reMedia!

An entertainment blog that pops culture right in the kisser.

Thursday, August 17, 2006

film | OMG! LOL! WTF!

After a merciless dosido around this year's release schedule, the stagnant Japanese-horror remake PULSE finally wheezes into multiplexes just in time for the cinematic trash days that usually comprise the late-summer box office, and I'm really quite sad to report that this is a fate the movie totally deserves. The reason for my depression in two words: Kristen Bell, an engaging, intelligent, compulsively delightful firecracker in the title role of the über-smart and highly addictive teen-detective soap Veronica Mars. (Tuesdays at 9 p.m. this fall on the CW!) throughout Pulse, Mars nuts will probably visualize their dear Veronica — as keen, levelheaded and sharp as ever — rolling her eyes at most everything about it, from the ridiculous premise (evil spirits enter reality via computer wormholes) to the kooky dialogue ("There's no system to shut down. THEY ARE THE SYSTEM!").

Bell's plucky undergrad teams up with a townie mainframe whiz (Ian Somerhalder of Lost, far too pretty to accept spouting incredible revelations regarding Wifi, viruses and portable memory drives) to investigate her boyfriend's suicide, which, they learn, had less to do with depression than the plague of creepy ghouls he inadvertently unleashed on the world from the comfort of his own PC desktop. Or something. There's a germ of a nifty idea in how kids today are doomed by relying on convenience technology that allows them to pull so far back from honest-to-god human interaction that they simply disappear altogether, and director Jim Sonzero, working from a hackneyed screenplay by Wes Craven, loads the early scenes with enough text messages and chat-room conversations to underline, italicize and boldface the point. But Pulse, with its woefully bungled scares and nonsensical slasher-flick "logic," is ultimately such an unwieldy mess that you wouldn't notice if it suddenly segued into a commentary on Great Britain's naval eminence following the Battle of Trafalgar.

Despite a few genuinely creepy moments and a more existentialist story that sidestepped the silly cyber-babble, Japan's original Pulse [Kairo] never overcame its funeral-dirge pacing. If the Hollywood honchos who greenlit this version thought they could take it to the next level, well, they were right. Their Pulse is dull and stupid. D

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