October 13 - Pulse

I had started to watch each of several different movies tonight, but none of them really caught my fancy. I finally decided on Pulse, which is not the movie I thought it was, but still a pretty decent horror flick, so i was pleasantly surprised.

It starts out as a lightning strike hits a nuclear power station or something, causing a spike in the electricity, which then appears to travel down the power lines and into a residential area. You can't really see anything untoward going on, but since the camera is focusing on the lines from the station all the way down to a single house, you get that impression. At first I was wondering why it picked that particular house, but later on in the movie you find out it hasn't just targeted a single house, but seems to be spreading to multiple homes.

Anyway, there's a death in that house, and a guy who goes crazy and finally accidentally electrocutes himself while hacking the place to bits with an axe. A week later, a young boy arrives across the street to spend some time with his divorced dad. The kid seems to be the main character of this movie, and we follow him more than anyone else.

So this kid is sitting there watching a ballgame while his dad and his dad's new wife are out having a few drinks, and the TV begins to, shall we say, "malfunction." The kid turns it off, and there's almost a fire in the dryer before the dad gets home, and of course the dad blames the kid, because come on, who ever believes the kids when they say shit like "I didn't do it, it did it by itself?" Yea, right! So over the next few days, more and more little disasters seem to happen, almost resulting in the death of the kid, and finally the dad's girlfriend begins to catch on.

She checks with this electrician who is trying to fix up the house across the street, where the guy went crazy and died, and he tells her it's not the first house he's seen like that. He mentions the "voice in the wires" and says it's a signal, not a thing. He himself has gone back to wood stoves and kereosene lamps! And after that, well, she runs back to the house where the kid is and the problems just get really bad.

There is no nudity in this movie, though the dad's girlfriend has that semi-hot mom next door thing going on, and despite that, the movie builds suspense from beginning pretty much to the end. They don't bother to explain any more about what's going on, and I think that counts in the movie's favor. Who cares WHY it's happening? As the TV repairman says while repairing the TV "Look, you want me to admit it? I don't KNOW why it happened." And that's pretty much the theme of the entire movie, that technology has just run amok and nobody understands it. And frankly, if that was what some people were feeling back in 1988, I can't even imagine how they feel nowadays. lol

This movie is pretty exciting to watch, though, so despite the lack of exceptional acting or any nudity or even a tangible monster or alien, it's still pretty good. UNfortunately, I'm not even halfway through the month yet and I am running out of things to watch on crackle.com. :-( I'm going to have to start hitting my own meager collection soon and that's not going to last long! lol