Pulse 2: Afterlife (2008)

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

A story that's too fascinating to pass by...

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

PULSE 2: AFTERLIFE is a sequel to the remake of a Japanese ghost film. The Japanese film was great, a fine little slow burner, which is why I'm subjecting myself to these American versions of the tale. I wonder why I bother when the film is of the quality of PULSE 2, which is as awful an attempt at a horror movie as you're likely to get.The story is about characters who find themselves pursued by the dead who can now appear thanks to wireless communication devices. What this boils down to is a never-ending storyline of a father and his daughter who find themselves pursued by the spirit of the girl's dead mother. The CGI ghost effects are awful, like something out of THE RING remake where the ghost girl comes out of the TV, but even worse are the endless CGI background to almost every scene.Why shoot the whole film on a green screen, 300-style? It makes everything look fake and unrealistic, and to compound this the acting is poor and the characters one-dimensional. Scares? Try elsewhere, you won't find any here.

In the intro we meet some guy all dressed in red including using red dye in his eyes. He walks around town and runs into digital souls.Then we meet a woman surrounded by ash. She realizes her daughter is missing. She starts looking for her everywhere, but everyone acts weird, even a little girl who's supposed to be her daughter.Then we meet the husband/dad. He too is looking for the girl. When he finds her, he takes her to the woods were folks are trying to keep the disease away. The disease is something that turns your veins black and kills you and has affected the entire country. His mistress also ends up at the cabin. When he starts reading emails from the wife, the mistress catches the disease and infects some other guy.Meanwhile dad and daughters are on the run and meet red guy who forces him to take some piece of electronics that according to red guy will save the world.Mom shows up again to take the daughter but dad saves the girl. Eventually a bus shows up that take people to a refuge camp.I didn't see Pulse 1, but more or less knew what it was about based on the trailer. The premise is a good one. Dead people live in this digital limbo, they are alone and hang around the world eating people's souls. What they get from it though isn't explained. Pulse 2 could have done a lot with that idea. But instead because of a small budget I presume, focuses on this one completely uninteresting family. There is no reason for the audience to care about any of them. At first it deceives us by focusing on the mom, who turns out to be one of these digital zombies interacting with a bunch of mental zombies. Unfortunately when our main characters are the living, things are still lame. The pace and tone of this movie are super dull. I fell asleep near the end. Even terror scenes are filmed in such a boring way. But that's the problem when you have a short script and have to make a 1:30 long movie out of it. Another problem with having no budget is that they chose to film the entire movie in front of a green screen. An interesting choice during the scenes where the digital zombie is the center of the action. But for the rest of the movie not so much. A shame that this movie isn't better. The basic idea really lends itself for some good movies.

When I rated "Pulse I", I had two bad impressions:1-- Characters I did not care about.2-- Failure to breathe the expectation of terror into the premise of the Dead coming back through our communications Technology.Pulse II made a good try. The Characters, this time around, were people the audience was supposed to connect with-- unlike the first movie which focused on a couple of vapid cardboard college students.This time, it's a family that is caught up in the on-going emergency created by the undead communications plague. A little girl, her mother and father have been separated-- both by the plague and by marital strife.Problem: the movie begins moving with these long camera shots of a woman crying and whinging through the remains of her shattered life and wondering where her little girl is. Now-- for a guy looking at a horror movie-- we're waiting for the whinging to be ended by something bloody and scarifying. Instead, she goes on and on and on until it becomes just annoying to watch and hear. What's her problem? Is she a Moron? Hello, Lady-- we know about the female penchant to be dazed and Confused and Whiney at the End of the World-- but JEEZ!! THEN we get the picture! OHH. SHE'S DEAD!That's alright then-- but the movie should have clued us in that TWENTY MINUTES AGO!!!!!Okay-- mystery cleared up. But the movie fails to pick up the pace. Enter the Father and the equally clueless brat-- Excuse me-- adorable daughter. In fact, Daddy is clueless as his dead wife. I mean, in the middle of a catastrophe caused by the Dead invading the world through Cellphone and the Internet-- you figure a GUY would know that poking at an email program with your crazy dead wife on the other side is like--SUICIDE?!?!? Well DOH! Even the tramp girlfriend knew better!!The failing here, again, was the the inability to create a sense of terror in the notion that the dead are lurking behind every electronic On/Off switch. The sight of a blinking light on a Laptop should instill dread and expectation. Instead-- it's turned on because Idiot Dad humps tramp girlfriend and bumps the table. And Now, it's connecting to the WIFI signal. The viewer just rolls his eyes. Ooooooh Scary! Pop a finger out your mouth, whirl it in the air and make the appropriate expletive we all know. Besides, even when we're in the City, we WISH we could get a WIFI signal that fast!! SO we KNOW it's unreal fantasy!!A Half score. A near failure only because the first one was a pure failure. Jamie Bamber was wasted here-- unless the director thought that this movie would click with the Chick-Horror-Flick crowd. Again, in the end, we just don't care. Pulse III was on the shelf at Blockbuster when I picked this one up-- it will stay there. I won't even bother if I see it for download. Such a waste of a great scary idea!! WASTED!

If you thought PULSE was bad, OOOH just you wait! They made a sequel!If you did happen to see these both, you may at least recognize some of the actors in the first one, however this movie only was supplied with some of the worst. If acting was a draw- back, then understanding what they where talking about was another story. It also used the pleasantly Awful blue screen, where the backdrop... well looked as fake as it was.... While it was vivid and layered with parts atop of another, the actors looked washed-out and out of proportion. Even though I didn't LIKE the first movie, this one just sets another bar! To add, the plot is TERRIBLE, and questionable.And what's up with the father calling his daughter 'squirt'? It was obnoxious and corny, and given the circumstances I wouldn't appreciate it... And the naked girl.... obviously just wanted that thrown in there to widen their target market, and make us laugh even harder they added a fat man jumping off a bridge. Seriously, don't waste your money or your time on this movie like I unfortunately did.