Click to watch

Trailer for "Pulse"

Japanese horror films, known as J-horror, have almost singlehandedly rescued genre fans from a quagmire of American remakes and sequels. They tend to feature pasty-faced ghosts (usually children with pitch-black eyes and solemn expressions) and an unbearable fatalism. They’re doubly unsettling for US audiences because their foreign setting makes it difficult to tell if their ambiguity stems from the supernatural or merely an alien culture. Hollywood, smelling a trend, is recycling them with blonde actresses like Naomi Watts and Sarah Michelle Gellar—heaven forbid discerning moviegoers should endure the subtitled originals. With Ringu and Ju-On already remade as The Ring and The Grudge, it was inevitable that some progressive studio would also regurgitate Kairo, which has garnered a following here.

Pulse is the handiwork of Dimension Films, the folks responsible for six Children of the Corn sequels and for running the Hellraiser and Halloween franchises into the ground. I’ve never seen the original Kairo, but I wish I had. I thought viewing the Americanized version without any preconceived notions would better enable me to evaluate its merits. Unfortunately, I had absolutely no idea what was going on for the entire running time of the picture. It seems to have been fashioned for people with phobias of the Internet, cell phones and laundry machines, and for reasons I can’t fathom, these devices serve as a gateway to our world for hordes of bald ghosts that spread like the Avian flu.

Kristen Bell from Veronica Mars, Ian Somerhalder from Lost and Ron Rifkin from Alias are on hand to remind us that better material can now be found on TV than at the local multiplex. Pulse was shot with a bleached film stock that makes each character appear to have blue or green skin; there’s an interracial couple in the mix, but you’d never know it looking at them. Wes Craven is credited with co-writing the screenplay, but there’s no telling how many people had a hand in re-editing the final product, standard operating procedure for Dimension fare. This choppy mess is muddled and incoherent, lacking even the rudimentary logic of a video game, which it resembles.

It’s obvious why Dimension didn’t screen this for critics, who feel compelled to warn their readers away from such hackwork. If nothing else, I now want to see Kairo on DVD just to understand the plot.