Kairo

I don't want to give away anything about this wonderful, haunting film. If you liked "The Sixth Sense", "The Others" or "Ring", this will show you how those films pale in comparison. I felt my skin crawl so many times, and the movie has been haunting my thoughts for days now. I sincerely hope that a wider audience has a chance to experience this dark, beautiful film.

This film starts out well, doing all the right stuff. It had me going for awhile.

But it get's slower, and slower, and slower--not to mention murkier. It is one of those films that would have worked fine as a 90 minute movie--even with some flaws.

But , anyway, this film goes on for about two hours, long after the viewer's interest has begun to wander and you've started scratching your head, wondering exactly what is happening.

Toward the end it kind of degenerates into overly long scenes of people running around in blasted, derelict industrial buildings breathing very hard into their microphones and shouting uninspired, predictable dialogue.

Some things just aren't very dramatic. Longish scenes of people poking around in pretty much abandoned industrial settings looking for stuff and breathing hard into their microphones isn't dramatic.

By the end, we are working our way through a checklist of horror movie clichés in excruciatingly slow motion. Ancient horror movie clichés have to be executed with a certain cleverness, a certain panache, and perhaps a little inventive camera work/cutting. Some snappy dialogue, some attitude. Or maybe you just have to get them out of the way fast. That's not what happens in this film.

The premise is rather interesting, but some of the exposition kind of conflicts with the stated premise--unless the stated premise was a red-herring. It's hard to tell from what they give you on screen and the film didn't motivate me to try to figure it out.

So, nice idea, good start ... really, really slow, pretty much unimaginative ending.

Maybe if they had had a bigger special effects budget ...

Sometimes you don't need frantic action or buckets of blood to have a movie that scares you out of your seat.

Like the character in I am Legend, there are few people left on Earth at the end of this movie. Tokyo is a ghost town. Where did they all go? That is left for you to argue. Good film for a discussion group.

Is there a finite space where all the souls of the departed go? What happens when that space fills? Interesting questions that are addressed in a very creepy manner by this movie.

But isn't the universe expanding? Do we have to worry now. Is death preferable to living, if you are lonely? You are constantly thinking while you experience this film, and you are never sure of the answers. Call it "adult horror," if you will. It is definitely one to see.

I'm an old horror buff. I've seen some of the more notorious stuff around (Salo, Cannibal Holocaust, Caligula,...), but they all more or less about visceral horror.

Which doesn't work if you helped slaughter a few pigs.

What does work? Psychological horror. Impending doom you cannot prevent. Things you can't see or understand, but that are there right in front of your face. Music that shouldn't be scary, but which lingers anyway.

It's a typical, slow moving J-Horror with an atypical idea behind it. That oblivion is actually preferable than immortality.

Gore doesn't scare me - but some ideas do.

Like i said - it made me squirm... One of the best horror movies ever made - for the patient ones.

What could have been just another RING rip-off turns out to be one of the most thought-provoking and genuinely eerie films I've seen come out of Japan: it's a film in which the door between the living and the dead is accidentally opened, leading to all manner of sinister events as it transpires that the dead are returning to Earth.

Like most J-horrors of the past decade, PULSE is a slow burner that moves almost glacially, gradually slotting in the various pictures of the jigsaw as its final game plan becomes apparent. Saying too much would spoil the intriguing, dream-like narrative, suffice to say that this is a film that doesn't disappoint at any stage during its progress. The 'ghost' segments are supremely creepy and disturbing, countered neatly by shock suicide scenes and a clever bit of FX involving a plane that was later cribbed for Alex Proyas's Hollywood movie KNOWING.

The cast give typically understated performances that increase in intensity as the character list is gradually whittled down, leading to one heck of a grim climax. Altogether, I can't fault the direction, writing, acting as all three combine to deliver an imaginative and thoughtful ghost story that's extremely different from most of what's come before.