Sunday, February 23, 2014

Pulse (2001)

If there's two things you can count on, it's when there's a forbidden room everyone will want to go in it and when there is a chance of being killed if you're alone, everyone will split up and wander off by themselves.

After one of their coworkers commits suicide, a group of friends reviewing a disc that he had been working on and find a view of him standing in his room in front of his computer with a ghostly face on the screen.  It's pretty damn odd and creepy.

Meanwhile college student Kawashima decides it's time to get on the internet. But when his computer connects to the net by itself and asks "do you want to meet a ghost", he understandably freaks out.  The next day he goes to the college computer lab to seek help as to what happened.

I didn't know anything about this movie except that the cover said it was the scariest film of the year and it was Asian. So that seemed like a good bet.  But I did neglect to check what year it came out, so for all I knew it could have been from the 1950s which was not so scary.  It was only when I  heard the modem connecting to the net that I went, wait a minute how old is this film?

It's got an interesting premise which involves ghosts entering our world because the place that souls end up is full. There is also the subject of loneliness and the fear of being alone.  As the populace starts disappearing, people become more alone with their fears.  Forbidden rooms - which can be identified because they are sealed with red tape around the door - are popping up all over the place, and some idiot always has to go in them.

There were some super creepy things, like a black human shaped smudge on the walls where someone died, or inside the forbidden room, or the ghosts on the internet.  But even though those were very unnerving, overall it wasn't that scary.  It had some interesting concepts, but didn't move me.

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