Strong and Moving!

hyped garbage

There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;

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.

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.

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!

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.