Pulse series

  • Pulse 3 (2008)

    Pulse 3 (2008)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, April 2020) As one could guess from a barely-known third-in-a-series horror film, there really isn’t much to say about Pulse 3. The ghosts-invasion-through-the-Internet apocalypse of the first film happened years ago, and now the human survivors are in rural camps while cities are off-limits. Then, proving that even idiots have survived the apocalypse, a young girl strikes a videoconference romance via an illicit laptop and decides to go see him… in the city. That is about the last coherent thing that happens, although I suppose that it could have been worse. But what remains is still not that good: half the movie looks as if it was shot against greenscreen for even the most ordinary shot, and at the script level the attempts to earn sympathy for the ghost antagonists simply don’t work. Pulse 3 never quite knows what to do with itself, but those problems grow even worse in the third act. Adding insult to injury, my only reason to see the film, Noreen DeWulf, is only there for a few minutes in low-resolution screen and gets an unfortunate send-off. I’d recommend avoiding Pulse 3, but really the joke is on me because I’m the only one dumb enough to even watch it.

  • Pulse (2006)

    Pulse (2006)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, January 2020) I like a lot of what Pulse attempts to do—namely, blend the technological with the supernatural and poke around at some of the fears of the information age. The dead possessing the living using technology—that’s still a great premise: someone should make a movie about it. Alas, Pulse aims for the lowest common horror movie denominator, and by that, I mean a teenage audience, with a by-the-numbers execution that barely scratches the potential of its premise. The good ideas (and a few good visuals) don’t last long, as the college-age characters run around screaming. Christina Milan does look great—but she’s only in the movie for a moment. Otherwise, Pulse is so conventional that it becomes boring considering the random scares: there’s no discipline to director Jim Sonzero’s approach. The mid-2000s patina of the film is obvious not only in the technology being used, but also the constant bathing of everything in blue light. Sure, Pulse can be worth a chuckle or two at the way it completely drowns the potential of its premise into generic horror clichés… but there are other better movies that should be watched before this one.