Eye Candy #467 - "Pulse"

Pulse: This movie, like many movies these days, was marketed wrong. Instead of marketing it (appropriately) to the sci-fi crowd, it was marketed to the (inappropriate) horror crowd. I will admit right off the bat, Kristen Bell is HAWT so I had already pretty much decided that I would check this out on DVD regardless of what I’d heard. Not surprisingly the reviews were uniformly bad but after having viewed the film, I don’t think they are completely deserved.   The skinny: people, including our dear Ms Bell, are all going to school at an unnamed American university. Soon, shadowy shapes, flitting images of people, and ghost-like beings begin to appear, attacking regular humanity. Soon, society is breaking down, people are committing suicide in gruesome fashion, and more and more of the ghosty people keep appearing and appearing.  The conventional wisdom would have you believe they’re ghosts. However, they’re NOT. And the explanation of who they are is intriguing – there was an experiment by several college students involving wireless communication, resulting in them discovering frequencies that weren’t previously known. Once they discovered these frequencies, they also discovered voices communicating on said frequencies, but the voices had the ability to modulate frequencies if they thought they were being listened. And then they began to invade our world, attacking humans so they could (and this is the only really dumb plot point) steal their “will to live”, at which point a human’s body is consumed from within and eventually causes them to turn to ash and such (it would have been better if they had just said that they stole souls, because that’s what it looks like). So they kill people by making people want to kill themselves.  Because the beings travel by frequency, they can appear anywhere there is a cellphone, a computer hooked to the internet, email, instant messenger, PDA, or walkie-talkie (but oddly enough, not radio). The only way to stop them is to either destroy the signal or go some place where there is no signal or network like the desert. Or, you can make your apartment airtight cover your entire apartment in red tape because the red blocks their ability to travel by signal. So I guess it’s partly a comment on our technology-driven society and our over-reliance on wireless communication devices (it’s certainly much more compelling of argument: “Don’t use cellphones or you’ll get cancer!” versus “Don’t use cellphones or evil creatures will come steal your will to live!”). Bell does okay with what she’s given. She is accompanied by Ian Somerhalder, Boone from “Lost” as a hacker who discovers how to stop the creatures (or at least how he thinks they could be stopped). The rest of the cast isn’t noteworthy (though we do get a little Ron Rifkin love).  So, it’s not a bad movie at all, and it's got plenty of creepy images in it to go around. It’s also certainly not the full-on horror movie that the ads would have you believe (I swear some of the marketing departments for the studio houses need to learn their audience better; if there’s no blood and gore, you can’t market it like “Texas Chainsaw Massacre”).  Woodchuck sez, “Worth a look.”