Pulse 2

I have never seen a movie like this one. I really do like horrors of any kind, but after seeing this movie I thought that I wasted one and a half hour from my life. First of all, I would like to mention that I enjoyed the first Pulse movie, and that's the only reason why I watched the second too. In contrast with the first one - which got a good story, some mysterious scenes and great effects -, the second is about some phantom women, who died, but they came back to life for some personal revenge. I always watch the IMDb's votes for a movie, and I think that barely all the votes were objective and understandable. Than how could this movie got 3.9 votes? In my opinion even the 1 point is too much for this production. Sorry, to say this, but don't watch it!

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.

Do not see this movie. There, I warned you. It is an absolute pile of garbage. I'm not even talking about the plot, story, screen writing or the acting, I am talking about the way the film was shot. The entire thing is shot in a sound studio next to a blue screen. The first minute of this film look creepy and promising. What follows is an absolute disaster. The actors are not even interacting with one another. It is glaringly obvious that one actor was shot doing his or her part in front of a blue screen, then another, then another, then it was all layered together. None of the actors are even looking at one another because they are not there. This movie sucked, and it looked like hell. What a waste of time and money.

So the apocalypse has been brought forth by ghosts who want to suck the lifeforce out of the living (as the first film sets things up). That's a pretty neat concept for any horror movie. Except, in "Pulse 2" not too much is done with it. Instead the story focuses on a divorced man trying to protect his daughter from his ghostly ex-wife, trying to get her hands on her. It's applaudable that the scripts takes different routes, presenting us new protagonists (instead of trying nothing new by whooping up another bunch of teenagers), but it hardly makes up for an exciting movie. The plot is oddly structured too, as the first act exists solely to lead the viewer up the wrong garden (after about half an hour, it gets clear who the real protagonists are). There are a few entertaining moments - like the scene with the naked woman half melted into a black goo on the floor - but they remain nothing more than just moments. The story is pretty thin and the ghostly images are severely underwhelming. Nothing ever gets scary in this film. And what on earth was up with all those obvious green screen effects? A lot of backdrops were used for both exteriors and interiors (the sequences in the cabin were just a bit too much of all this). On the one hand it created a weird look & feel for the film, but on the other hand it's just too distracting for the viewer (I spent most of the running time figuring out how they composed all those shots, instead of getting involved with the story, acting, etc). So, "Pulse 2" turned out a strange viewing experience: interesting from a technical point of view and a bit offbeat in some ways, but way too average and unconvincing as a scary movie. Still, it's good the producers didn't go flat-out for what could be expected in a nowadays sequel. "Pulse 2" turned out something 'different', and while not all of it works like it should, it's not as bad as most people claim it is.

Wow, there are so many bad things to say about this one that I don't know where to begin. Let's start with the obvious: the excessive use of green screen. I'm not lying to you when I tell you that about 90% of the scenes take place in front of a green screen. The use of it in Pulse 2 is just absolutely unnecessary. Do we really need a green screen background when a woman is walking down the street or someone else is walking down the steps? Even just sitting down in a cabin...you guessed it, green screen. It completely detracts from the film because it uses up all of your focus and it's done horribly. When you're watching a film and the background looks like an old video game and DOESN'T MOVE, it's a little ridiculous. The budget on this film must have been a couple thousand dollars since they definitely didn't use any money on the sets or effects.

Now, on to the story...also pretty bad. Not only does this film come as a sequel to a horrible remake (Who asked for Pulse 2 by the way?), but it doesn't really fit in with that film too much. In a nutshell, we're given a story of a woman searching for her child who is now with her husband and these computer creatures are chasing them and yadda, yadda, yadda. You begin to realize quite quickly that the story makes little sense and most of the acting is rather awful.

There are very few redeeming qualities in Pulse 2. Even when you find something about the film that you might enjoy, it's completely ruined by the constant green-screening of EVERYTHING. Let me say that I'm being generous even with a 3/10. Don't even give this one a rental unless you're desperate to see just how bad it is. And Pulse 3 is on the way soon...God help us all.