a film so unique, intoxicating and bizarre that it not only demands another viewing, but is also forgivable as a satirical comedy where the jokes eventually take the back seat.

Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

There are moments that feel comical, some horrific, and some downright inspiring but the tonal shifts hardly matter as the end results come to a film that's perfect for this time.

Josh Ockmann is attacked in the library. His girlfriend Mattie Webber (Kristen Bell) finds him in a disturbing state at his apartment and then he hangs himself. After getting mysterious computer messages, her friend Stone (Rick Gonzalez) goes to shut down Joss's computer but it's already taken. Stone is attacked just like Josh. The landlady sold Dexter McCarthy (Ian Somerhalder) the computer. Josh had sent Mattie 3 rolls of red duct tape 2 days before he died. The rolls are split up between Mattie and her friends Izzie Fuentes (Christina Milian) and Tim (Samm Levine). There is an epidemic of suicides in the area.The movie is saturated with the color blue. Along with the Eastern European location, this drains the life out of the movie. It tries quite a few jump scares. Mostly, they don't work because the story is lifeless. The other problem is that the spirits come out of nowhere randomly. It actually gets a bit boring.

I first watched this in a cinema while on holiday in Thailand and although I knew nothing about the movie, it looked interesting enough to give it a go and I was not disappointed.A computer hacker unwittingly hacks into the computer of a fellow student who was working on technology to discover alternate frequencies. Unfortunately what he hacked into was also a pathway for spirits and demons to gain access into our world of the living. It sounds like a stupid premise for a film plot, and it kinda is, but for a horror movie it sets a rather interesting chain of events in motion that for me at least, seemed to work.Josh, the computer hacker, is attacked by a spirit and becomes withdrawn. His girlfriend, Mattie, worried about his state of mind, goes to see him. She finds his apartment is unkempt and Josh in a zombie-like state. He walks off and when she goes to look for him she finds that Josh has suddenly hanged himself in the other room. Mattie and her friends start to receive messages from Josh's computer repeatedly asking them for help. This starts her investigation into what he was up to and what has led him to commit such an act.Throughout the movie people start to randomly become withdrawn and display tendencies of no longer caring about themselves or anything around them, including her other friends, until they either suicide or their bodies wither and die leaving nothing but ash. As more and more people end up disappearing the only remedy seems to be to lock yourself away and seal the room with red electrical tape. This has something to do with the colour spectrum and not allowing the spirits to penetrate through that colour.The spirits that find their way through via internet connections, WiFi and any kind of digital signals, prey on the living and literally suck their will to live. Being the spirits of the dead, they seem to draw on the life force of people. The whole things appears to start by way of a viral program that appears on computer screen entitled "do you want to see a ghost". What appears next is a series of images of people that are in a dark and withdrawn state either staring blankly back at the viewer or they are engaged in some form of suicide; and as the movie progresses, you realise that these images are people that have recently succumbed to having their life force drained.Mattie discovers what is going on and with the help of Dex, who had purchased Josh's computer, discover that there was a program developed by Josh that may put an end to the whole thing. Mattie and Dex find the university computer server where it all apparently started and upload the counter virus and the whole system crashes. However after it reboots, the spirits re-emerge and it starts all over again. Their only solution is to get away from the cities and therefore, away from anything that can receive a signal such as mobile phone etc. Essentially this means the world is back in the stone age.Overall I enjoyed this film yet it's not one of those horrors that people will want to see over and over and it did suffer from some inconsistencies which do let it down as they could have been handled better. It's dark, depressing and moody and despite people losing friends and family and multiple suicides happening regularly, people seem to be caught up with their own personal struggle rather than overly worrying or mourning about others. Some people have commented that this doesn't make any sense and the whole movie is stark and lifeless, yet for me it's deliberately allegorical for today's society. How many people do you see these days, with their heads buried in iPhones and iPads, caring more what's happening in the digital world than what's just outside? It's not always noticed when a friend doesn't surface for a few days, so the dark mood and sombre tones are in keeping with the story. Pulse is also the Americanised version of the Japanese film Kairo, which I have since also seen and unlike other awful Americanised movies such as The Eye, I enjoyed Pulse much more than it's Japanese counterpart.There have unfortunately been 2 or 3 sequels to Pulse which were direct to DVD which try to expand on the story, but this was totally unnecessary as Pulse can quite easily be a stand alone film.

The movie has similarities in many things with "One Missed Call" & "Fear dot com". But I need to give it to the movie that when you watch it, you definitely get hooked though you know what the ending will be and you can predict how the whole thing would go. There is no smart plot, the idea has been consumed already and the horror scenes are not scary at all! There are stupid scenes as well like when they try to reach the server at the end to stop the virus, they manage to walk through thousands of ghosts and nothing happens to them! Then she proceeds alone as Dexter fails to follow her and you logically suppose afterwards that he won't make it but miraculously he does! This is just stupid!

The spirits of the dead discover a way to contact the living and enter into their world through electronic devices. Moreover, these decidedly nasty and dangerous spirits suck the lifeforce from the living. A select group of folks find out what's going on, but can they figure out a way to stop the angry and lethal spirits before it's too late? Director Jim Sonzero, working from an inspired and intriguing script by Wes Craven and Ray Wright, relates the absorbing premise at a steady pace, stages the shock set pieces with considerable flair and skill (a sequence in an underground apartment laundry room is especially harrowing), and does an expert job of creating and maintaining a potently spooky, paranoid and sinister atmosphere which becomes more increasingly eerie and unsettling as the plot unfolds towards a startlingly downbeat surprise apocalyptic conclusion. This film further benefits from solid acting by the sturdy cast: Kristen Bell is appealing as the perky and worried Mattie, Ian Somerhalder is likewise fine as shrewd computer boffin Dexter, Brad Dourif has a neat cameo as a raving doomsayer in a café, plus there are sound contributions from Christina Milian as the sassy Isabelle Fuentes, Rick Gonzalez as slick internet hustler Stone, Samm Levine as the easygoing Tim, and Kel O'Neil as the unhinged Douglas Ziegler. The ghosts are genuinely freaky and scary. The special effects are excellently done and quite convincing. Best of all, there's no obtrusive silly humor to detract from the grim severity of the bleak premise. The filmmakers warrant extra points for staying true to said bleak premise to the literal bitter end. Why, we even get a valid and provocative central point on how our over-reliance on technology could possibly reap the seeds of our eminent destruction. Mark Plummer's gloomy cinematography gives the picture an appropriately dreary look. Elia Cmiral's shivery and ominous score hits the shuddery spot. An unjustly maligned and underrated fright feature.