Pulse

Pulse

This film really rips off Stephen King’s book Cell.  A quite B movie with a little A talent in it, but it fails to deliver as a horror film.  It is about one of two or three films that came out with this sort of idea.  Technology taking over isn’t anything new, but there are good ways to work with this and there are bad ways, Terminator was good, the book, Cell, was good, and this film was poor.

The story starts with a college student who disappears after hacking into a computer of Douglas Ziegler who was working on a wireless system.  This system and program that Ziegler created and the student releases ends up being a fairly malevolent force that saps the will to live out of people.  Mattie, the girl friend of the student who releases the system, works with a new acquaintance, Dexter, to try and find some way to stop this system.  They come across a developer named Josh who comes up with a possible solution.  They create a virus which they have to take into the center of the wireless system, which, of course, tries to protect itself.  It works, but the system reboots itself and then the onslaught on humanity again.  The film ends with a voice over from Mattie talking about how humanity is going to have to regress with less technology in order to win.

The acting in this film is very B.  Kristen Bell stars in this film as Mattie.  She is a pretty talented actress who hasn’t done a ton of great roles because she has been type cast as the sweet smart, tough, pretty gals as in Veronica Mars.  The rest of the acting is pretty unknown.  Christina Milian also shows up as a very attractive actress.  And all the male leads are pretty poor.  Jonathan Tucker and Ian Somerhalder are the two male leads, but it really isn’t good performances at all.

It is sad that Wes Craven, a master of horror, ends up helping with the screenwriting in this film.  People won’t know that he is attached to this film, but it is a sad thing that he is.  In a film like this you don’t expect to get much out of your talent and Jim Sonzero, the director, doesn’t take advantage of any of this.  At a few points in time there is some solid CGI, but overall there isn’t anything to talk about critically from the visual standpoint.  It is a very darkly shot film, which I guess isn’t a bad thing, but it fails at anything more then that.

This is an unintentional B movie, but with some B films, that is a good thing.  In this case it is a very bad thing.  Kristen Bell really doesn’t seem to care all that much about the film, and she is the one bit of real acting talent.  This film doesn’t work enough even as a mindless film just to enjoy, a film like The Crazies, is much better then that.  A decent story, but overall it is very boring with a couple of highlight sections and none of them are even all that special.

Entertainment Grade: C-

Critical Grade: D

Overall Grade: D

The Crazies (1973)

The Crazies (1973)

As I promised, I would review the original one to go along with the remake, and for once in my life, I have to say that the remake was much better.  This film gets bogged down in trying to be something more then simply a horror film.

The story is very similar.  A plan crashes next to a small town and a biological weapon leaks into the towns water supply infecting the town members.  It even starts the same way without spending any time building up the event that causes the infection but jumps straight into the infection stage.  This time it is a volunteer fire fighter, his fiance, and a buddy of theirs who have to try and fight for survival against the military hoping to out last and out hide the onslaught of the quarantine.

There are two areas that make this film less then what the remake were.  The first thing is the character development of the main characters, David, Judy, and Clank.  At no point in time do you really feel sympathy for them.  They are made to be self righteous, perfect characters who have real characteristics that someone can latch onto and sympathize with.  Where as in the original Joe Anderson’s Deputy was a very sympathetic character when he becomes infected, Clank, the buddy, simply doesn’t create any empathy in his role.  The only one that slightly does out of the three is Judy, and she is very much second fiddle to David and Clank, so any sympathy she might have warranted doesn’t really take hold.

The other area that this film suffers is with the military.  In the remake, the military is basically kept behind the gas masks and is very faceless.  In this film, they try and create a military that you are supposed to hate.  They mock them military for being clueless and make them look like stormtroopers with their ability to shoot at anything, whereas the “heroic” towns people can be on a dead sprint with a shotgun at their hip and nail a soldier at 200 yards.  Very early on in the film they explain why this is.  They make a reference to the Vietnam War, which was still going on at the time.  The view of those making the film is clearly written on this film as they try and force feed you an evil, incompetent military.  Their are only two members of the military who don’t meet those standards, both of them middle-management types, for lack of a better term.  The lowest level are basically soulless and too stupid for anything more.  The upper level is conniving and  idiotic.  The two who are, maybe, supposed to garner any sympathy for the military at all are forced into a situation being handled poorly.

The one redeeming feature of this film is the character of Kathy, played by Lynn Lowry.  She is one of the crazies, who devolves throughout the film into madness.  There is really very little other interaction with the crazies other then on a mass scale.  Kathy ends up being stuck along with the main group for a little while, so we get to see her, and her father, go crazy on a more personal level.  She ends up devolving wonderfully never seemingly going berserk, but instead she plays a very calm and irrational and erratic sort of crazy.  Her death is marred by a very stupid line thrown in, but being that this film really comes across as a cult classic as much as a horror film to today’s audience, it isn’t a bad thing, completely.

This version of The Crazies probably carried more weight when it came out with it being in the middle of the Vietnam War.  To people viewing it now, it just seems extremely contrived in terms of a plot and beats the viewer over the head with the message that it wants to give.  This could still work if the message were still relevantly portrayed (see Crash a few years ago) but as it stands it is simply a B movie that isn’t good (or bad) enough to be deemed a cult classic.  George A. Romero has definitely had much better work that is worth checking out over this mess of a film.

Entertainment Grade: C

Critical Grade: D

Overall Grade: D+

The Crazies:

The Crazies (2010)

This remake of a 1973 George A. Romero horror film that doesn’t rely on the typical over indulgence of gore that permeates so many current horror film.  It might be a little cheesy and cliche at times but it is a solid horror film that is very classic.

The story is a pretty typical one for a horror film.  A mind altering toxin is accidentally released into a small town in Iowa’s water supply.  The un-infected people have to try and survive against those who are infected and want to kill everyone and they have to survive the government as they come in to clean up the mess.

The acting is much as you would expect for a horror film.  Timothy Olyphant does a solid job playing the small towns sheriff and Joe Anderson steals the show at times playing the slightly off beat deputy.  They aren’t great actors in the film, but they aren’t as annoying as the normal scream idiots that show up in horror films.  Even the actresses in the film are solid as compared to the typical dumb blond eye candy.  They might not be as memorable in terms of their acting talent, but they don’t detract from the film, which is very nice to see.

Probably the best thing about this film is there are two brilliant scenes.  One at the beginning of the film where they line up ways to kill one of the bit characters.  It starts out with a light in the barn from a combine and the character walks out there and she stands in front of the combine, and nothing happens.  Then she turns off the combine and hears a scream from her son inside.  So she runs back inside and finds her son who tells her that her husband has a knife so they go hide in a closet.  Instead of breaking through the closet door, he locks them in instead and pours gasoline on the door, down the steps and out to the porch before lighting the house on fire.  It is really well done in that it takes you from one means of death to another so smoothly and it is almost at the point where it is funny because you know the deaths are coming, but you don’t know when or how.  The other amazing scene has to do with a car wash, and you just have to see that one to enjoy it.

This is just a very classic horror film.  It doesn’t try and have a profound plot or a ton of twists.  It keeps the jumps pretty simple, and even with that they worked quite well in the theaters.  And most importantly, in my opinion, is the fact it wasn’t a gorno (a combination of gore and porno) but relies on creating a simple and entertaining jump scenes and simple suspense.

Entertainment Grade: B+

Critical Grade: C+

Overall Grade: B