Kiyoshi has had a fairly steady stream of horror work from the late-80s to today, including the mysterious Sweet Home, which is something of a cult classic in Japanese spook cinema and for which there’s a running debate as to whether the movie was based on the video game of the same name of vice versa, as both were released at the same time and the commercials for both were one and the same: a movie and video game ad in one. Sweet Home is a hard-to-find flick, made doubly frustrating by the balls kicking fact that there was never an English translation production, so even if you can find it, you better hope you know someone who either speaks Japanese or was so brainwashed by the Vapors that they’re well on their way to turning as such. Fan made English subbed versions have popped up on the internet and at geek summits (i.e. conventions) from time-to-time, but given the supposedly low entertainment value of the movie, it’s entirely up to you whether or not you’re willing to pay in excess of $40 for a muddy bootleg of a half-assed haunted house flick. But, that’s Sweet Home and this is Pulse so, as much as it pains me to do so, how about we get back on track, savy?

Let me start by saying that this isn’t so much a horror movie as it is a depressing film about loneliness, futility, loss and death, with ghosts and a dreary setting to help illustrate the point and the repeatedly renewed potential that we’ll eventually reach this cloud’s silver lining. I’ve yet to see the American remake to contrast and compare with just yet, but from the trailers I’d definitely say that the producers for this US undertaking either didn’t get the point of the original or just wanted to use the few horror elements and the basic foundation of “ghosts coming through the internet” because they couldn’t come up with anything better on their own. Sadly, the original is also marketed as a horror movie instead of what it really is, leaving it better suited for whimpering high school kids who think that they’re the only ones in the world who know what it’s like to be sad and alone and misunderstood. I went through it myself, I realize I was a tool for being as such, and seeing movies like this that try to invoke those same feelings again really just make me glad that I dumped that pathetic self-important cry baby emo bullshit and started doing something with my life… as lame as it may be… my movie reviews being the major case in point here… And so, on with the show.

You can find anything online in this era of hi-tech falootin' hoo-ha with the kids these days and their wireless modems and their Fondle Me Elmos™ and their... uhm... high-waist pants... and... bah. Anyway, from trailer trash mothers of 12 getting romantic with well-hung livestock to q-list celebrities trying to pinch out one last 15 minute loaf of fame by playing internet poker to homemade videos of fat kids living out their George Lucas encrusted fantasies, you can get it all on "the internets" as a certain nose-wiping, murder-happy, thumb-sucking plebian politician puttz would say. Despite all that, one thing you can't get online is snuff movies!... oh wait, you can download those off of Limewire or Kazaa or WinMX or Shareaza or eMule or iMesh or FilePipe or Bit-Torrent or Phex or... well, you get the point.

Anyway, right around the time shit like FeardotCom and Horrorvision were trying to tap the (legitimately ignored [and with good reason]) horror subgenre of website based evilness here in the states, across the pond (the one to our left, not to our right) in the land of wind and ghosts, a guy who way too many people have confused as being the son of Akira Kurosawa decided to make a movie about ghosts running a website where depressed people kill themselves... fun. Okay, so there's more to it, but we'll cover that later. For now, let's meet our happy young friends from the East, shall we?

First we have the trio of Michi (Kumiko Aso of 2004's Casshern), Junko (pronounced "Joon-koe" and not "Junk-o") and Yabe (Masatoshi Matsuo of 2000's Tomie: Replay), three friends who are working on some kind of computer program. Though it's never said exactly what this mysterious Windows upgrade is being created for (all we know is that there's a deadline attached to it... no pun intended) we do know that it's near completion and our three intrepid youngsters require the help of fellow hacker ("Where's my Tab™?") Taguchi, a solitary wiener of a geek of a feeb who lives alone in his drab little one bedroom junkie apartment in the ass end "last stop on the late bus" part of Tokyo where he uses a shower curtain for a bedroom door and sleeps on a soiled mattress on the floor. The rest of our new single serving friends pretty much consist of the pretty-boy 'net newbie Kawashima (Haruhiko Katô of Another Heaven) who gets into the whole online thing "just because" and his soon-to-be romantic interest Harue (one-named actress Koyuki of Ryuhei Kitamura's Alive and Tom Cruise's :::shudder::: The Last Ass Samurai) who teaches computer classes at Kawa's school and is way too eager to go home with any guy who might have an interesting website for her to look at...

But, back to the first group, having not heard out of the Tagster for a week and in desperate need of whatever the fuck it is he's been working on, Mich volunteers to go over to his place and pick up the CD containing the program in person. Despite Tag being a little disorganized and a tad zoned out, everything seems fine until Mich goes to say goodbye before leaving and finds that the little pud has lynched himself... and not without a lot of effort given the low ceilings and lack of things to hang himself from... I mean, his ceiling is to close to his floor that the guy’s literally squatting after he dies! That aside, being the last person to see the kid alive has a profoundly negative effect on the poor Michmeister who isn't quite the same for the rest of the movie, despite the love and support of her friends. Taggy gets burified, the trio goes to his funeral and Yabe, who’s curious about some odd images he sees on the disc picked up by M-to-the-ichi, goes back to Taguchi McKillSelf's abandoned pad to seek some clues. Jinkies Shaggy, put out those doobie snacks, cuz I smell a mystery!... or is that just the copious amounts of chronic you just kiestered, miester?

The shit goes from a slow drizzle to a rapidly gaining snowball now, as Yabe witnesses a greasy black smear on one of Tag's walls that turns temporarily into Tag before turning back into said oily smear again. This somehow motivates Yabe to look behind the dead boy's desk to find a piece of paper that says "the Forbidden Room" on it. This then somehow gives our curious cat the clarity to investigate a small studio apartment in the same building whose door has been duct taped off for an undetermined amount of time by an undetermined person for an undetermined reason. I don’t know myself, it just seems the Japanese aren’t really big on little details like exposition and instead choose to let the audience come up with their own conclusions. Is this the sign of progressive filmmaking or just creative lazitude? You decide.

Though the untrained viewer may think this duct taped doorway is simply a case of someone trying to save pennies on heating or trying to keep out the potentially radioactive super bugs Japan is known for, it's quickly made clear that it’s to keep people away, because the room is... wait for it... haunted. Yep, haunted and by some inky black smear of a phantasm that's a big skidmark straight out of Al Bundy's tighty-whiteys one minute and a really pale Japanese girl with a blank stare on her face the next. Yabe gets spookified (come on dude, I see scarier girls than that on the R train at 2am on a Thursday night and you don’t see me cowering under a bunch and laying brown bricks in the back of my britches) and spends the rest of the movie damaged in the brainpan, until offing himself later. Yeah, don't act so surprised, of the 10 or so people with speaking roles in this movie, almost all of them will have done themselves in by the time that 90 minute mark hits and those credits roll. Why’s that? A wave of mass suicide scale depression seems to be hitting the city as of late as people mysteriously begin making themselves well hung in the bad way, doing half-gainers off of industrial complexes into sold concrete face plants of the literal kind, or just taking a page out of Kurt Cobain’s book and introducing their grey matter to the science of professors Smith & Wesson. What’s causing this massive trend of self-killing self-indulgence? Hold your water Junior, we’re getting there.

However, in the interest of fairness, let’s go meet Kawashima, okay? Kawa’s not the brightest bulb in this string of blinking Christmas™ lights we call a cast, as he’s well behind the curve in terms of techno-savy. Though his computer doesn’t seem to be new (it looks like he’s been using his keyboard as a placemat for at least a couple of weeks when we first meet him), we see him take the first timid steps toward getting connected to the world wide waste-of-time known as the web. He’s connected his dial-up (right, like people in Japan were still stuck on dial-up 5 years ago! Suspension of disbelief is one thing, but fucking dial-up?!... heh heh “butt fucking dial-up”), he’s installed his browser (a little something called UR@NUS for you horror nerds who make your own Trivial Pursuit™ cards) and despite getting numerous error messages it seems he’s somehow managed to make that most intimate of connections: the internet. Well, maybe not the internet per se, but a webpage that asks “Do You Want To See A Ghost?” before showing muddy footage of a guy with a plastic bag on his head. Thoroughly creeped by the whole thing, Kawa panics and turns off his computer… only to have it turn itself on later that night and automatically connect itself to the same website… to which I would have immediately yanked every plug on the damn thing and tossed it out my bedroom window for someone else to exorcise.

Not willing to give up his sorry little Windows 95™ runnin’ junker though, Kawa instead seeks out aid for his computer voodoo in the computer lab at his school… or what I’m assuming to be his school, since no one really seems interested in telling me who or what these fucking people are or what they do with themselves! It’s here, while skeeving out the nerds with his newbie talk of ghostly web pages, that he’s approached by computer tutor (cuz “computer teacher” doesn’t roll off the tongue like “computer tutor” does) Harue who’s intrigued by his talk of this homepage of the dead. The two become fast friends and it’s through Harue that Kawa is not only introduced to an obnoxious and pointless computer program about a colony of magnetic kamikaze dots that will serve as the most blatant of metaphors for the movie’s theme, but also to Harue’s work partner Yoshizaki. Yoshi’s a bit of a prick, too wrapped up in himself to be very social, no doubt stemming from years of childhood abuse for his flagrant geekery (like everyone reading this review doesn’t relate to that…), but he’s a central part to our story… for all of 5 minutes, but in that short time he proves himself more useful as a plot device than any of the otherwise meatheaded cast members we’ve met so far. ‘Zaki (he’s a Lego™ maniaki), while discussing with Kawa the topic of ghosts and how they just like dicking around with us living schmucks, spills the underlying plot of the movie to us as such: ghosts aren’t going to a Heaven or Hell after they die, but are instead the essence of the living after being transported to another bordering dimension upon the death of their physical being. At the moment of death the “spirits” pass immediately through to this other world, leaving a sort of gateway at the very spot of their demise, hence the black paint streaks. In this other realm the space is apparently more finite than anyone originally thought possible, so after countless millennia of plagues, genocide and general outliving of our bodies, it seems they’re starting to run out of room over there in limbo, so many of the recently dead are being oozed back through into our world, hence the sludge people popping up as of late. The problem with this is that the re-appearances made by the freshly departed seem to be driving anyone who witnesses them into tailspins of fear and depression, thus leading everyone to kill themselves and thus adding more protoplasm to the already cramped ghost world (I’d give up my inky black existence if it meant being the meat in a Thora Birch – Scarlett Johansson sandwich for 20 minutes) which leads to more ghost sightings which leads to more suicides which leads to this never ending cycle… well, until everyone’s dead, in which case I guess the ghosts will start taking up residence over here what with all the vacancies and such. While all this is going on though, supposedly the ghosts are trying to communicate with us through the internet (seeing as how it’s the fastest growing form of communication today and since you can get your message across easier with streaming video than you can with static heavy whispers of “heeeeeelp” over the phone) in an effort to get us to stop killing ourselves… and if that’s the case, somehow showing video of my friends killing themselves doesn’t really give me that “life is great, I want to live forever!” feeling…

And so, the rest of the movie consists of our characters seeing ghosts, killing themselves, watching other non-speaking characters kill themselves and trying to find some kind of anchor that will make their lives worth living, eventually being weeded down to a single character from either group. The two then meet up, bringing these seemingly random Tokyo residents together as they desperately cling to whatever life they have left and make a last ditch effort to escape the suicide plague turning Tokyo into a barren city of burning cars, cloudy skies and… holy shit! Look at that big jetliner engulfed in flames flying low into the heart of Tokyo! Gah!

So, yeah, that’s pretty much it right there. Everything drags on for way too long, many many things go unexplained, a spooky specter pops up from time-to-time and it turns out that the whole world’s falling under the spell of suicide hysteria: not just for angst ridden teens and depressed handicapped folk anymore! I was bored, I was confused, I was annoyed and, after all was said and done, I wasn’t comfortable typing this review at 4am without half the lights in the apartment on. Hey, I may not have been entertained by Pulse, but I was creeped out enough by it that I can admit so without feeling great shame for myself and my family damn it. I once said the following and had a friend accuse me of being a racist for saying so and, though I feel no ill will toward anyone based on their heritage or social standing, if this statement really is racist than I guess I’m somehow a racist. Whatever your personal feelings may be on the matter, here it is: Asian people look much scarier in horror movies than any other nationality. There, I said it. I think it’s seeing the otherwise squinted eyes, subtle facial features and slightly yellow-hued flesh being twisted beyond extremes that hammers the effect home to me. Wide gazing eyes, albino white skin and mouths opened to their limit seem all the more terrifying on people whom you never see this type of thing occurring naturally. Pale skin? Dude, just look at goth kids and the Irish. Wide gazing eyes? Not scary when your race isn’t unfairly bashed for being “slanty”. Mouths opened to their limits? Chigga please, I can fit a whole peanut butter and jelly in my mouth, crust and all with little effort.

As if the ghosts themselves weren’t shocking enough to look at, the whole “now they’re a big stain and now they’re a ghost” thing has my heart beating a little faster in the presence of my own shadow in the hours following this movie. Sure, the chances of an albino Laotian boy with stark black clothes and a Moe Howard bowl cut materializing out of my shadow are about as likely as that Ghost World tryst I brought up earlier, but sometimes the rational mind gets into a losing game of roshambo with the easily spooked subconscious mind and my standing as a no-nonsense bad-ass of coolness in multitudes takes a slap to the jimmy-hat… not that anyone has ever actually accused me of being a no-nonsense bad-ass with coolness in multitudes, but if there is anyone out there who originally thought that before this review, I apologize for showing you there is no Santa Claus. Even with the ghosts as an after thought, I gotta admit that the flaming plane coming down over Tokyo out of nowhere spooked the living shit out of me (literally, as there is no longer sentient feces residing in my colon at this moment in time). I wasn’t profoundly disturbed by the whole 9-11 thing like some are, and the fact that this movie was actually made in 2001 has no effect on my reaction to the moment, but when our heroine looks to the sky and the entire screen is suddenly filled with a flaming aircraft taking a dive into the city and exploding on impact, it’s jarring. Additonally, I’ve gotta admit, there’s some effective use of the already creepy beeps, buzzes and white noise sounds associated with dial-up connections. As if they weren’t scary enough already as harbingers of bad service and warning signs of “Prepare to tackle the internet at speeds of two pages an hour! Experience a disconnect every ten minutes!”, they’re all the worse when associated with the cries of the dead.

It’s because of these three elements (and my continuing love of that whole low-budget “drab and washed out” horror movie look Asian spookshows seem fond of) that I can’t conscientiously sit here and bad mouth Pulse down to the lowest common denominator. I don’t want to say it was slow, it was bland, the scares weren’t necessarily scary within the context of the movie, the characters weren’t interesting, the direction was grade school, Kurosawa expected us to have to fill in way too much of the story ourselves, the ending was unoriginal and predictable , and the main concept of the movie itself was a flaccid phallus to begin with, but that’s exactly what I’m saying. But, it’s extremely rare to find a flick that leaves me not just looking over my shoulder, but creeped out enough to not have the balls to do said looking period. Call me a pussy if you will, but like they say (joke coming in), you are what you eat! BUUUUUNNGG!

What do you mean, “What’s a bung”?! I don’t know, just go watch Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back while I go strike back at my tidy bowl. This is everybody’s favorite Egyptian Death God reminding you to always check the tp supply before sitting down and to please give a hoot and invoke the ancient law of the courtesy flush. Sayonara!