Impulse

I saw this movie on SciFi the other day and must say it was like no other. A lot of cool scenes with people doing crazy s**t, cause they're acting on their first impulse and giving no second thoughts to their actions AKA some funny s**t. It didn't seem like it was that old a movie until the dude puts on a sleeveless jacket. Well this is my first attempt at writing a review for a movie so whatever. I'm gonna write more so hopefully they'll get better and if they don't then go cry to your mother!

The idea of a town going slowly mad is not an original one, but it's cleverly handled in this disturbing little film, which eschews gruesome horror in favour of an accumulation of telling detail. Well worth viewing.

This is a kind of a mixed review. First, I'll get to the stuff that I liked about "Impulse". The movie doesn't try to do too much right away, instead attempting to slowly build a sense of terror. The protagonists are less stupid than what you usually get in a movie like this, figuring that something is wrong fairly early on. The actions of the sick townspeople are believable and creepy. And some of the photography is really good, giving the viewer some striking images.

Now, the bad stuff. The movie is ultimately TOO slow for its own good. If things were speeded up a little bit, the movie would have had an acceptable pace. While some of the photography is good, much of the movie has a flat made-for-TV feel (not surprising, since this was made by the ABC television network.) The revelation of what's causing the mayhem is not done by detective work, but more feels like the screenwriters were getting near the end and felt they had to reveal it right there and then. The ending is also unsatisfying, leaving several big questions unanswered.

I wasn't expecting much from this when it came on TV and was half-watching while doing computer stuff but it pretty soon drew me in. The characters and their interactions were much more realistic than I expected and the acting was really good. Last night I watched World War Z a big budget 'zombie' film from 2013 starring Brad Pitt and it was really poor - Impulse is a far more mature and involving treatment of a broadly similar theme.

"Impulse" is a movie for which I had relatively high expectations: the idea of people losing the ability to control their impulses and totally disregarding all the established social rules sounds very, very intriguing. However, the result we get here is (despite a few unexpected twists) a disappointing and very slow-paced (there is a dialogue-free passage where a man simply walks around for about seven minutes) thriller. George Romero had used basically the same story ten years earlier in "The Crazies" - and he did it much better. (**)