Pulse

To say Wes Craven's rewrite of Kiyoshi Kurosawa's 2001 "Pulse" isn't as bad as it could have been sounds like faint praise, but Kurosawa's "Pulse" is one of the true masterpieces of recent Asian horror, and the track record for Hollywood horror redos isn't great.

In this American remake of the spooky, more-atmospheric-than-coherent 2005 J-horror thriller, the ghosts blink and crackle into existence with an electromagnetic sputter, but really, they're not so different from the gauzy, see-through spirits of yesteryear.

A horror film dealing with the terrors lurking via our computers, cell phones and other electronic devices, Pulse isn't nearly as scary as watching your hard drive crash or having your BlackBerry conk out in the middle of a vital call.

A dumbed-down remake of Kiyoshi Kurosawa's disturbingly abstract Japanese horror film.

Tedious, baffling and ultimately laughable.

Hideously ugly to look at and not even worth following.

Here, the CG effects are plentiful, but the scare factor rarely rises above the level of a viral email, and the desaturated color scheme of Sonzero and cinematographer Mark Plummer makes every frame look as though it was developed in a solution of vomit and ash.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

"Pulse" was a movie that had no emotion, to begin with, there were no shocks that surprised me, but the photography is good, and the story was loose, and meaningless.

If you dont know science dont write stories with tech at center stage. Simply as that. The premise of this movie is that some college kids discovered a "frequency" that had never been observed previously using a computer and apparently a computer hack can fix the problem... Clearly the movie was going for some sort of wireless frequency and once the aliens arrived they took over internet servers. There is no such thing as a frequency we never knew existed, not within known tech. There are only frequencies that are not usable for various physics reasons. So anyway, the premise is garbage but hey, its a horror movie... or at least it tried to be. The problem is that its not scary in any traditional sense. There are no scary monsters, just some blurry human looking things that apparently take away your will to live. How? No revealed. Why? Not revealed. Who are these aliens? Not discussed. But hey, they are apparently afraid of the color red! So mysterious.... oooh aahhh. Lame. Stick with Pinhead, Jason and Freddy.