Pulse
2001
Director: Kiyoshi Kurosawa
Stars: Haruhiko Katô, Kumiko Asô, Koyuki
Reviewed by Brian M. Sammons
Remember the movie from 1988 about the killer electricity that gets into a home and turns all the appliances against the family? Well, this isn’t that movie; I just wanted to bring it up because no one talks about that Pulse anymore. No, this is the 2001 Pulse from Japan and writer/director Kiyoshi Kurosawa. They made a 2006 American remake (because of course they did) that I didn’t think was completely awful, but it was a pale shadow of the original. Well, three cheers then for Arrow Video for bringing the original out, in glorious HD, with a bunch of bells and whistles. But is this Pulse worthy of all that? Well, blow the dust off your old dial-up modem and get the red tape, it’s time to find out.
We begin with some young folk doing stuff with computers. One of their friends has been MIA for a bit, so one of the gang goes to check up on him. Yeah he’s dead, hanged himself sometime back, despite the girl just having a conversation with her about one minute earlier. Naturally others start looking into what would cause the young man to do that, and they discover that there is a little problem between the worlds of the living and the dead. And because this movie was made in Japan, where they just love taking modern and mundane objects and having them cross paths with the supernatural, computers and the internet are at the heart of the problem.
Now this is basically a ghost story with plenty of commentary on our modern lifestyle of living alone, cutting ourselves off, and general isolation. A lot of people who know of this film usually sum it up with: “the movie where ghosts are summoned through the computer.” Well, that’s a bit simplistic and also just wrong. Computers are important in this film because they are the only thing that connects many people today, their only lifeline to the outside world. How sad is it that this was made eleven years ago and things have only gotten worse? Anyway it’s not like the dead have to dial you up on AOL (is that even a thing anymore?) to get to you, unlike in the US remake where that seemed to be the focus of the movie.
If you’re worried about the filmmaker’s message getting in the way of you enjoying this film, fear not, because above everything else, Pulse is a creepy, moody, and scary-as-hell horror flick. Sure there are many more things to it than that, deeper meanings that can be ferreted out if you have a mind to, but if all you want is a scary ghost story, Pulse will deliver that to you and then some. I wish some of the art house horror films that seem to be en vogue today could claim the same, but that’s a rant for another day.
Let’s get to the special features on this new Blu-ray/DVD dual pack from Arrow Video. First there is an interview with director Kiyoshi Kurosawa that’s an impressive 44 minutes long. There is an interview with the director of photography Junichiro Hayashi that a respectable 25 minutes in length. There is an interview with fellow director Adam Wingard and writer Simon Barrett on their admiration for the films of Kurosawa and that is 17 minutes long. Then there is an archival making-of featurette that’s 41 minutes, video from the Tokyo premiere of the movie at seven minutes, and video from when it played at Cannes that’s a trim three minutes long. There is a collection of four featurettes about the special effects in the film that all together total 26 minutes. There is also a collection of TV spots and some station IDs from a channel in Japan.
Pulse is bleak, somber, and overall dark. So if you’re looking for a good time, or a fun horror movie, you should probably look elsewhere. But if you want a creepy movie that will get under your skin and chill your bones, Pulse is exactly that kind of flick. I love it and so I highly recommend it.
