USA 1988 91m Directed by: Paul Golding. Starring: Cliff De Young, Roxanne Hart, Joey Lawrence, Matthew Lawrence, Charles Tyner, Dennis Redfield, Robert Romanus, Myron Healey, Michael Rider, Jean Sincere, Terry Beaver, Greg Norberg, Tim Russ. Music by: Jay Ferguson.
An intelligent pulse of electricity is moving from house to house. It terrorizes the occupants by taking control of the appliances, either killing them or causing them to wreck the house in an effort to destroy it. Then it travels along the power lines to the next house, and the terror restarts. Having thus wrecked one household in a quiet neighbourhood, the pulse finds itself in the home of a boy's divorced father whom he is visiting. It gradually takes control of everything, badly injures the stepmother, and traps father and son, who must fight their way out.
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Pulse starts in an ordinary L.A. street which is disturbed by the antics of one of it's residents named Hank Jordan who is wrecking his house with a baseball bat, the police are called & break into Hank's house but find him dead. Young David Rockland (Joseph Lawrence) is flying into L.A. from Colorado to spend some time with his Father & Stepmother Bill (Cliff De Young) & Ellen (Roxanne Hart), things go well at first but one night when David is left home alone the T.V. & other various electrical appliances seem to take a life of their own & after almost being burned alive by a pilot light David is understandably nervous. Then David hears about the stories concerning the Jordan's & what happened, David becomes convinced that there is an evil presence in his Father's house that will try to kill them, at first Bill isn't having any of it but as the mysterious 'accidents' begin to add up he starts to change his mind...
Written & directed by Paul Golding I thought Pulse was an average horrorthriller that never even came close to getting my pulse racing. The script doesn't seem to know what it wants to be or who it wants to appeal too & is loose to say the least, nothing is explained in any sort of detail. What the evil electrical force is or where it came from or what it's trying to do, absolutely nothing about it is revealed. I also think that Pulse will disappoint most potential viewers in the sense that as a fan of horror films which Pulse supposedly is I was expecting a widespread outbreak of electrical devices turning against their owners all across America but in actual fact the pulse never leaves the confines of one house even though it could go anywhere & it doesn't kill a single person on screen, that's right not one person is killed in Pulse which just isn't good enough as far as I'm concerned. Instead director Golding thinks his audience would rather sit through chunks of boring dialogue, stupid unexplained narrative & an annoying teenage kid as the lead, well Mr. Golding I can tell you now that most horror fans like films which are scary & contain some semblance of horror. As it is Pulse tells it's story competently enough despite it's lack of any explanations & while there's nothing spectacular about it it's an OK way to pass 90 odd minutes if you don't expect too much.
Director Golding films everything without much style or visual flair but there are a few really effective scenes in which his camera goes 'into' the electrical equipment & there are some nice close-up shots of the circuit boards & wiring as the pulse melts the solder & rearranges it for reasons I'm not sure about, these shots are easily the most memorable thing about Pulse which says it all really. Pulse isn't scary & there's not much of a horror atmosphere to it either. There are some really dumb bits at the end when David a young kid manages to stop his Father falling back by grabbing him even though his Father probably weighs three times that of David, it wouldn't work in reality would it? Neither can I forget the scene when a circular saw manages to fire a screw at Bill & hit him in the forehead! Forget about any proper gore, someone's hand gets cut, someone is burnt & a screw hits someone's forehead is all we get.
Technically Pulse is alright, there's nothing really wrong with it. The acting is OK but again nothing special, Lawrence as the young kid gets very irritating.
Pulse is an OK film, I'm sure there are people out there who will like it but for me it was too dull, it never explained itself & the decision not to kill anyone during the entire duration of the film was a bad one, a very bad one.
Review by Paul Andrews from the Internet Movie Database.