听 User Rating 
Contains sustained horror and strong language
Power down your PC, turn off your mobile: there are ghosts in the machine. Technophobia goes wi-fi in Pulse, a retooling of Japanese head-scratcher Kairo in which HTML opens a portal to hell. Kristen Bell (Veronica Mars) texts in a Sarah Michelle Gellar impersonation as psychology student Mattie, who suspects that a mysterious computer virus is dialling up a connection between this world and the next. Former ad director Jim Sonzero reboots the original's apocalyptic dread to produce a remake that ain't an upgrade.
Reportedly hamstrung by studio tinkering, helmer Sonzero deserves credit for sticking to the gloomy urban doom of the J-horror source, sticking his buffed up cast of beautiful young things in an imposing landscape of Soviet-era architecture and shooting in desaturated greys. That's the extent of his inspiration, the rest of Pulse suggesting he's watched the VHS horrors of Gore Verbinski's The Ring once too often. Scares are straight from art galleries: ghostly internet clips look like hellish video installations; ghoulish freaks emerging from tumble drivers and a man sucked into a wall recall Francis Bacon portraits.
"SHOWREEL OF SHOCKS"
Strong visuals can't disguise a rambling script (co-penned by the usually dependable Wes Craven) or sleepwalking cast (Bell's outperformed by her own black eye-shadow). Ditching the eerie mysteriousness of the original's slowburn (some say plodding) apocalypse, Pulse plays best to inattentive mallrats, a showreel of shocks that explicates every enigma with a clunk: "They take your will to live! Everything that makes you you." And we thought they were just after our iTunes...
Pulse is released in UK cinemas on Friday 8th September 2006.
scared and provoked me in a way that nothing else ever has
