Director: Paul Golding
Cast: Cliff De Young, Roxanne Hart, Joey Lawrence

While every human being presently on this planet and back in the past has liked to partake in water - namely because without it, they would quickly die a long and painful death - there are certainly a lot of other things like to indulge in. Certainly, there is food, some specific kinds more than others; I have heard that everybody supposedly likes Sara Lee, but I've never had the chance to try one of their products since I am in Canada. Besides the obvious things, there are other things that people enjoy, and one of those things I am sure that everyone enjoys is a good story. And while certainly everyone has their own taste in stories, I think everyone at one point or another has enjoyed a scary story, from the time when cavemen were gathered around a fire to the modern horror movies you can find at your local multiplex. When you look at all of these stories, it's interesting to see what techniques the storytellers have used to entice an audience to observe their horror stories. One of those techniques is by centering the horror around subject material that is already scary. For instance, take the dark. Just close your eyes right now, and you will see... hey, why aren't you closing your eyes? Close them now, that's an order. Okay, now that your eyes are closed... hey, how are you still able to read what I have written here? Anyway... no doubt you know that the dark can be a very scary subject matter, namely because you are unable to see any nasty surprises that might be lurking within it. You are able to relate it to your own experiences being in the dark and not being quite sure that you are 100% safe. It's no wonder that this literally dark subject matter is still being mined for chills and scares after thousands of years of storytelling.

There are a lot of other subjects that instantly put a chill into people when they are thought about, so that a subsequent tale about them can easily be written that will entice viewers. For example, sharks come across as pure eating and hunting machines, so shark horror movies like Jaws have attracted a lot of fans over the years. Cougars are animals that always seems to be just as grumpy and vicious, as my review of Trap On Cougar Mountain pointed out, so it's a bit surprising that there haven't been that many horror tales of vicious cougars in the general public. But anyway, I want to talk about another technique tellers of scary stories have used to entice an audience, and that is by choosing a subject matter that on the surface isn't scary, but is made to be scary. For example, a while back I reviewed the horror movie Man's Best Friend, which was about a dog. Now, ordinarily, dogs aren't something that the majority of people find that scary. But in this movie, the dog had been genetically altered so it was a pure killing machine on four legs. While the movie did use this premise to deliver some good black comedic moments, most of the movie was devoted to showing that the dog was something to fear. And this technique worked pretty well. As I indicated earlier, most people do instantly like dogs in the real world. So a tale told to them about a dog that is a vicious killer would right away strike people as something unexpected. Being thrown off balance, people would subsequently be uneasy, and in the back of their mind they would wonder if all dogs have the potential to be as deadly as this cinematic dog. As the tale progressed, they would watch on with at least a little bit of fascinated fear in the back of their minds - and that is the sign that the horror story is working very well.

If I had a choice between a horror tale about a subject matter that is historically scary to many people, or a horror tale about a subject matter that isn't scary immediately, I would probably choose the latter. To me, pretty much all the scary potential has been milked out of material that in real life can be instantly scary. Plus, a horror premise with a fresh idea is much more intriguing. That's what the movie Pulse promised to have, so I was pretty eager to see something new that could possibly spook me in a new fashion. The movie is set up in a southern California suburban neighborhood, where things almost immediately start to heat up for the residents when during a lightning storm, a bolt of lightning hits a power station. This bolt of lightning at this location instantly produces a unique and malevolent electrical force, and this electrical force travels via the power lines from the power station to the nearby suburban neighborhood. The electrical force first goes across the street from the residence of the Rochland family, which consists of recently divorced Bill (Cliff De Young, Shock Treatment), his new wife Ellen (Roxanne Hart, Highlander), and Bill's son David (Joey Lawrence, Blossom). After getting into the neighbors' house and using their electric appliances to kill them, the electrical force then sets its sights on the Rochland residence. David starts to soon figure out that something is not quite right in the neighborhood, not just with the deaths of his neighbors, but also with a strange man (Charles Tyner, The Stalking Moon) creeping around the neighbors' house, as well as strange things happening in his own house. But David can't seem to convince his father or stepmother that something is up. Will David be able to stop the mysterious electrical force before it's too late?

I realize that phenomenon such as an electric force that is able to scheme and find different ways to kill people isn't exactly an everyday occurrence, but all the same I frequently get frustrated when characters in movies that involve supernatural "monsters" like the one in Pulse are mighty slow to realize that something isn't quite right. Fortunately, in this particular horror movie the characters reaction to what's going around them are pretty believable. Naturally, the first character to sense something's up is the child David. Although he isn't super smart, he still has enough intelligence to clearly see from the evidence presented to him that something's up with the electricity, though at the same time doesn't know everything about it. As David, actor Joey Lawrence not only shows believable smarts, but also is credible when his character is sad or terrified. The performances of De Young and Hart as the parents generally compliments the writing of their characters. Although it does admittedly take a while for them to sense something's up, their dialogue and perspectives have been carefully crafted in the screenplay so we can understand why they don't entertain the notion for a long time that there's a possible danger. They are not dumb characters, just find it hard to believe at first from their point of view. So I wasn't really annoyed by their way of thinking. The performances of these two characters by their actors, however, does leave a little to be desired. Hart is pleasant, but there is seldom a spark in her performance that will leave viewers remembering this character in depth for a long time afterwards. It's pretty much the same with De Young, acting strictly in an adequate way and no more. Though I did get some amusement by seeing how he resembles actor Wings Hauser, soon I started wishing that it was Hauser in the role; he would have put in a lot of manic energy.

The actor who steals the show in Pulse is Charles Tyner as the mysterious old man who is hanging around the neighborhood. He manages the near impossible task of being creepy and amusing. It's unfortunately that not only does he only appear in two scenes in the entire movie, it's never made clear what this character knows about what's happening and what his ultimate plans are. The character seems to serve no purpose except to help elongate the pacing of the story. Which brings up one of the big flaws of this movie - the story chugs along for the most part at an incredibly slow speed. There are many scenes that could easily have been shaved down significantly or completely eliminated. There are some significant chunks of the movie where the killer electrical pulse is pretty much to completely forgotten. Also, we never get a sense of this "character" - we don't really know how it thinks and why it's so homicidal. Because of this mishandling of the "monster", it's often hard to feel any threat brewing for any of the characters. Actually, the movie often seems to be more interested in the subtext concerning the family in this movie. It portrays an already fractured family (divorced father who is a workaholic, stepmother who is trying to get her stepson to warm up to her, the stepson who wants to be with his birth mother) suddenly in risk of disintegrating due to an uncontrollable crisis. I admit that this could have added some dimension to the movie, showing how the human condition can react to something way beyond its control. But at the end of the movie, I didn't really get a sense of what the characters were feeling and thinking about the crisis they had just gone through. They were more as devices for the movie to show danger or injury upon and around them rather than being people we could observe and share their feelings and pains.

But I have to admit that some of these attempts in Pulse to showcase horror and terror on these flesh and blood devices do on occasion manage to work to a degree. Writer/director Paul Golding does frequently use some simple yet effective tricks to lay on the atmosphere, such as having low lighting, and keeping the background noise silent and throwing in a few uneasy noises every now and then to break the quiet. Also, he managed the cameraman to make some stand out shots, from slow pans to close ups of the inner workings of electrical equipment. Such techniques really add enough "oomph" so that the low budget never really becomes apparent. And in the sequences where the pulse really shows off its malevolent intentions, you really do get a sense of struggle and pain from the characters (there are some injuries that will make you wince a little). However, I don't think the movie got to its full potential with the horror. For starters, the movie only went as far to get a PG-13 rating, which may disappoint fans of really sadistic and bloody violence. While I am speaking of that, I feel I should mention that believe it or not, there are only two people killed in the entire story - that is, if you add a character who was killed just before the point in the movie where the story really starts. It probably goes without saying that had Golding removed some of the obvious padding and instead had other residents of the suburban neighborhood being knocked off every now and then, the movie would have been a lot more satisfying. There would have been a feeling that "more" was happening, fans of bloody violence would have been satisfied, and all viewers would think that the movie would have a stronger pulse than what was actually generated.

(Posted April 13, 2024)