Pulse 2

Rating R Formats DVD Genre horror Starring Jamie Bamber, Georgina Rylance, Karley Scott Collins, Boti Bliss Directed by Joel Soisson Publisher Dimension Home Entertainment

Every so often, one comes across a movie that redefines the term “terrible.” For a while now, my standard for terrible was A Sound Of Thunder, arguably one of the worst movies made in the past decade. And, of course, there are those terrible Sci-Fi channel movies that I’m totally convinced are made to be cheesy – I always picture a group of people sitting around a table and rattling off names of wild animals to make a pseudo-horror movie about: Mosquitoes! Ticks! Salamanders! But what makes movies like A Sound Of Thunder different is the undeniable fact that they try in earnest to be decent films, and fail with a thud. Enter Pulse 2, my new standard for everything unholy in this world.

Pulse 2 is a prime example of a sequel to a movie that was already pretty bad. Sure, the first Pulse had some genuinely creepy moments, and the suicide factor may very well have inspired the recent The Happening, for better or worse. But despite the few positives there were, there’s no denying it was far from a good movie. I’m willing to bet Pulse 2 was greenlit before the first one even came out in theaters. That’s the only explanation I have for how gut-wrenching terrible the movie is.

The film starts like The Sixth Sense in reverse – a woman (Georgina Rylance) has discovered she is dead and is on the hunt as a static-on-the-television specter for her daughter (Karley Scott Collins) that was taken from her by her ex-husband (Jamie Bamber) via divorce. There are other static ghosts around the town, and you discover by suggestion that they travel through electricity in some way, though the movie never takes the time to explain how or why the whole suicide-apocalypse thing is going on. If anyone ever sees this movie and has not seen its predecessor, they will go insane. I almost did, and I saw the first one.

The movie isn’t so terrible for that reason alone. The acting (or lack thereof) isn’t remotely decent. There is never for an instance a true feeling of dread, and halfway through the movie (which is 89 minutes WAY too long) you find yourself wishing the actors had never lived so that such a terrible movie would never find its way to the screen in any format. Have I stressed enough that this is a bad movie? It’s horrible. It makes Ishtar look like it should have won the academy award.

The biggest fault the movie has, and there’s a grocery list worth of faults, is the special effects. Almost every scene in the entire film is green-screened. A Sound Of Thunder had this problem, but Pulse 2 elevates it to a whole new level. Even cheap made-for-TV movies take the time to film on a location every so often. Take an episode of “Seinfeld,” where between scenes they have a shot of a building or a random street with people walking by, and you have more on-location shots than you do in the entire movie here…which wouldn’t be so bad if they had made it look remotely convincing. Sometimes people don’t have shadows. The lighting is always off. Scenes that, in the normal world, would have the leaves of trees rustling or grass swaying in the slightest of breezes, are completely fixed like a painting. I’m pretty sure the actors are running on treadmills half of the time. It’s that bad.

The movie even tries to have a side-story about a guy who thinks he has discovered how to keep the electric-static-people away (once you die after exposure to the pulse, you turn into a static-ghost…but it’s never explained how the pulse came around or what it is). Too bad that side-story is never resolved, but that’s ok, because nothing could possibly save the movie – not even the “shocking ending” spoken of on the DVD case description.

Speaking of the DVD case, it’s all a lie. The scene on the front never happens, and the zombie-people on the top half of the case never make an appearance once. They actually look pretty menacing, like they’re out of a Romero film. But they aren’t. I kind of wish the case was a show itself – a fake DVD case if you will. But it’s not. How unfortunate. If Pulse 2 succeeds in anything, it succeeds in making you relate to the characters: after being witness to the pulse, whatever it is, you kind of want to kill yourself.