Pulse

I love Japanese horror movies - well, sort of. They kind of need to come up with some new classics now. I love the obvious ones, such as Audition, The Grudge and The Ring (see the villains in O Men 2.1), but I do have a soft spot for Pulse (or ‘Kairo’). I don’t know why this is, because it isn’t by any means a perfect film. It’s kind of a lacklustre end-of-the-world movie, where you don’t really see the end of the world.
I first saw it one morning on a weekend away in sunny Brighton, and I remember it being a bit too long and slow. But I’ve been drawn to it time and again, and in fact I’ve just finished watching it again today. It’s funny with these Japanese films - sometimes it’s hard to follow who’s who and what the hell is actually going on - so it’s nice to be able to watch Kairo and look at the more subtle connections. So not the perfect film, but there’s just something about it...
In the meantime, I finally got round to watching the American Pulse remake. I’ve heard nothing but terrible things about it, and when I saw Wes Craven’s name attached, I did worry that he’d turned it into some stupid teen shocker. I didn’t actually think it was that bad. As stylish as I wanted it to be. It just suffers, like the original, from a sort of lacklustre-ness.
But hey, that plane crash is a doozy in both movies.