Pulse 2: Afterlife

2008
3.4| 1h29m| R| en
Details

The world has been reshaped by the invasion of ghosts via the wireless internet. Cities are deserted, technology has been destroyed and the few remaining human beings eschew anything electrical in order to avoid a confrontation with the soulless ghosts that now wander the planet. Most of the ghosts are doomed to a repetitive loop of something they did while they were still despairing humans (a man repeatedly hangs himself, for example), but there are some ghosts so locked in denial, they do not know they are dead. They continue to haunt their homes, wrapped in fear that their souls will soon be torn from them.

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Reviews

Karry Best movie of this year hands down!
ThrillMessage There are better movies of two hours length. I loved the actress'performance.
Nicole I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.
Sarita Rafferty 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.
Leofwine_draca PULSE 2: AFTERLIFE is a sequel to the remake of a Japanese ghost film. The Japanese film was great, a fine little slow burner, which is why I'm subjecting myself to these American versions of the tale. I wonder why I bother when the film is of the quality of PULSE 2, which is as awful an attempt at a horror movie as you're likely to get.The story is about characters who find themselves pursued by the dead who can now appear thanks to wireless communication devices. What this boils down to is a never-ending storyline of a father and his daughter who find themselves pursued by the spirit of the girl's dead mother. The CGI ghost effects are awful, like something out of THE RING remake where the ghost girl comes out of the TV, but even worse are the endless CGI background to almost every scene.Why shoot the whole film on a green screen, 300-style? It makes everything look fake and unrealistic, and to compound this the acting is poor and the characters one-dimensional. Scares? Try elsewhere, you won't find any here.
DigitalRevenantX7 PLOT OUTLINE: The world has been invaded by ghosts who enter this realm through computers & cell phones. Michelle Kramer, a single mother who lost custody of her daughter Justine to her unfaithful husband, goes out on the streets looking for her, only to find that the child is actually with her father. Michelle, who is unaware that she is actually dead, tries to get her daughter back while her ex-husband does his best to save the child from her.PULSE was one of a spate of horror films made in Japan during the boom of the late-90s / early 00s. This particular film was the work of Kiyoshi Kurosawa, a filmmaker who was not unlike David Lynch, with his work being almost universally hard to follow due to having murky impenetrable plots. That said, Pulse was the greatest success that Kurosawa ever had, probably due to the strong atmosphere that he had invested in the film. The execs at Hollywood made the decision to conduct a remake. This remake was strictly a mediocre affair, the only good thing it did was having explained all the plot dead-ends that the original failed to do.While it was a rather dull remake, the film only just made its money back, prompting the execs at Dimension Studios to greenlight not one but TWO sequels, of which Pulse 2: Afterlife and Invasion was the first. The man responsible for making the film was Joel Soisson, a director who is known in the industry as a 'hatchet man'; his career consisting of stepping in to finish other people's films & making cheap sequels to genre films.With Pulse 2, Soisson figured that the few fans the remake had would be already familiar with the concept, so he decided not to invest any energy in re-establishing the concept, instead hitting the ground running.The first thing you'd notice about this film is the fact that the film suffers from a very poorly written script. You'd think that having spent close to twenty years in the B-movie gutter would make Soisson a good filmmaker. He does have good experience. But the fact is, Soisson is quite a bad director & even worse writer. The script he delivers for Pulse 2 is written according to cliché & has some absurd characterisations. The female characters here are so badly drawn that the viewer is left groaning. Georgina Rylance, who plays the mother, delivers her shrill characterisation with a completely flat performance that becomes the source of unintentional laughter. The 'surprise' revelation that she is actually a ghost is telegraphed miles in advance & only serves to make the viewer groan in disbelief. As for the rest of the cast, only the male actors manage to give good performances, most notably Jamie Bamber, who plays the father. Bamber is the only actor who gives us reason to feel sympathy for him.Acting & script aside, what really sinks the film is the rampant overuse of digital effects. Most of the background shots & sets consist of still images digitally inserted into the film, the actors doing their thing in front of a green screen. This unimaginative use of CGI is pointless to say the least & reeks of lazy filmmaking. The sets are not the only victims of digitalis imageris insertis – the ghosts themselves look like they were taken from a video game!Another flaw with Soisson's approach is the way he mounts the shocks. The set-pieces – Rylance's uncle covering himself with dead cat entrails; a fat man stripped down to his underwear jumping off a bridge; a gas station attendant pouring petrol all over himself; a man having sex with a partially-disintegrated Boti Bliss – are not only lousy, they veer into bad taste.
flow_down After watching the first one, I was hopeful of a good sequel. I found Pulse to be brilliantly done, and didn't find out there was a sequel until recently. So, I sat down for a good scare, pizza slice in hand, only to be disappointed. In fact, as the movie went on, I found myself getting angry. Angry that someone had the gull to make this movie. Angry that they would associate this piece of junk with the first Pulse. This is one of the worst movies I have ever watched. Don't let the first two minutes deceive you. That is by far as good as it gets.The acting and script is PAINFULLY bad, the effects were cheap and obvious, the music was made from somebody's "pawn shop special" keyboard, and the story line is totally boring and predictable. This is somebody's money making scam, banking off the first movie to sucker people into watching this rubbish.Don't waste your time, especially if you enjoyed the first one.
Matttttttttttt Wow, there are so many bad things to say about this one that I don't know where to begin. Let's start with the obvious: the excessive use of green screen. I'm not lying to you when I tell you that about 90% of the scenes take place in front of a green screen. The use of it in Pulse 2 is just absolutely unnecessary. Do we really need a green screen background when a woman is walking down the street or someone else is walking down the steps? Even just sitting down in a cabin...you guessed it, green screen. It completely detracts from the film because it uses up all of your focus and it's done horribly. When you're watching a film and the background looks like an old video game and DOESN'T MOVE, it's a little ridiculous. The budget on this film must have been a couple thousand dollars since they definitely didn't use any money on the sets or effects.Now, on to the story...also pretty bad. Not only does this film come as a sequel to a horrible remake (Who asked for Pulse 2 by the way?), but it doesn't really fit in with that film too much. In a nutshell, we're given a story of a woman searching for her child who is now with her husband and these computer creatures are chasing them and yadda, yadda, yadda. You begin to realize quite quickly that the story makes little sense and most of the acting is rather awful.There are very few redeeming qualities in Pulse 2. Even when you find something about the film that you might enjoy, it's completely ruined by the constant green-screening of EVERYTHING. Let me say that I'm being generous even with a 3/10. Don't even give this one a rental unless you're desperate to see just how bad it is. And Pulse 3 is on the way soon...God help us all.