Customer Reviews

Pulse

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(9)

 

 

A bickering mother (Madeleine Stowe as Senga) and daughter (Mischa Barton as Nat) are on their way home after visiting Nat's estranged father. While at a rest stop their arguing gets so bad that Nat abandons her mother and runs off with a mysterious hitchhiker (Bijou Phillips) that they had picked up. The mystery girl persuades Nat to join her cult and Senga frantically begins to search for her daughter. Eventually, they both learn that this cult has sinister intentions.
Madeleine Stowe plays Senga with surprisingly little emotion while Barton's character comes off as a real brat. They never get along and even when Senga attempts to rescue Nat they're still going at it. The movie gets cliche in the final half hour as Senga becomes a one woman army battling the evil cultists. However, the movie does build some good suspense through Senga's fear and suspicions of people who dwell during the nocturnal hours. There's also a good song called "F.E.A.R" that plays over the end credits.

Aspiring filmmakers can always count on inspiration from a Marcus Adams production, if stuff this weak is actually making it into $11 Million productions there is hope for everyone no matter how semi-literate or imagination challenged. "Octane" aka "Pulse" looks like one of those productions that had its inception when a music video production designer stumbled across a neat looking industrial complex and got someone to cobble together a story to feature the set in something more than a music video. It looks like it was written on the back of a napkin at a truck stop because music video director Adams took huge liberties with Stephen Volk's script, and many of these changes were literally made on the set during shooting.

Rather than use the set in one of his music videos, Adams assembled a cast and shot a movie long on style and short on intelligence and substance. Imagine a nonsensical mix of "The Horse Whisperer", Rosemary's Baby", and "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre". Volk's original screenplay of a British mother and her 12 year-old daughter trapped in a car on a motorway they could not get off, was fundamentally altered. So much so that Volk seriously considered having his name omitted from the credits. Adams' "on the fly" changes destroyed any possibility of unity and logic. Confused viewers searching for hidden meaning and explanations are wasting their time, there is simply no method to the madness.

Madeleine Stowe suffers through this with a bad haircut and a general look of stunned surprise. Most likely due to having the her script change on a hourly basis. All this gives the movie a disjointed look.

Barton looks pretty used up until her love scene with the cult leader (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) when they put her in heavy eye makeup. With her anorexic face, gap teeth, and big eyes you can really see the Mia Farrow resemblance. Unfortunately Barton has a huge Cameron Diaz smile which tends to spoil the illusion. Her smile is the creepiest thing in the whole movie. Although contrived and silly this scene looks great and almost justifies making the movie-but it would have been much better as just a music video, duh.

Beware of a movie with multiple titles. Apparently "Octane" refers to the tank truck the cult uses for transportation and making merry, although it is actually a milk truck. Maybe they should have called it "Lactose". The how and why of the "Pulse" title remains a mystery, there is a hint about vampires but any explanation must have been on Volk's second napkin which he accidentally left behind at the truck stop.

Close viewing of "Octane" will also be an inspirational experience for aspiring editors as most high school video students are ahead of the movie's post-production people. A particularly glaring jump cut happens early when Stowe runs out of the path of a speeding truck. The long lens makes the truck appear to be about three feet from her as she scrambles out of the way, two seconds later they cut to a side shot and the truck is still several feet from reaching where she had been standing.

Think about it, with that same $11 Million to spend Dominique Swain could have cranked out eleven equally lousy movies.

Then again, what do I know? I'm only a child.

This movie was awful. Madeline Stowe deserves better, and Mischa Barton should stick to the O.C
Dumb premise gets even more muddled when the mother (spoiler!) finds her daughter, the daughter still behaves like a total brat. I would have left her with the bloodsuckers.

_Pulse_ is a bizarre movie about a mother and daughter travelling along a highway late at night on their way home from visiting the father. The movie then plunges into total weirdness as we witness the actions of a bizarre cult as they disguise themselves as ambulance medics and attempt to rescue a man trapped in his car after a crash. Apparently this cult seeks bigger things. After stopping at a diner because the mother is beginning to become sleepy, the daughter picks up a hitchhiker, who tells a tale of her travels to India to the daughter and mother. Then, things get weird as the hitchhiker asks to be let off at the nearest rest area and immediately disappears leaving her CD featuring Indian chanting. Later on they stop again and this time they have a spat over concert tickets that the father has given to the daughter in the movie. This time the cult ends up finding the daughter and kidnapping her. The rest of the movie is spent as the mother tries to regain her daughter from their evil grasp. However, towards the end of the movie it begins to make no sense again . . . and the ending completely remains unfulfilling. The movie is suspenseful nonetheless and will provide a night's worth of entertainment as one faces the horrific tragedy of a killer highway cult. However, what exactly this means we may never know, because the movie has failed to wrap up the ending in an understandable manner. I still enjoyed it however and thought the idea was strange which is why I am giving it 5 stars.

In this film made in UK and Luxembourg, Madeline Stowe stars as Senga. Senga and her daughter Nat are driving at midnight after visiting Nat's father. They bicker the whole trip and it just increases when they stop for a break at a rest stop. Nat runs away with a mysterious girl who tries and recruits her into a mysterious cult. And we are left with a nerve wracked mother doing all she hectically can to retrieve her daughter.

Both the daughter and mother eventually learn that this cult kills people for their blood. Why they do so is never explained. And even at this point when Senga is trying to rescue Nat, she still acts like a brat. The last third of the movie seems to just generate more confusion. And becomes unbelievable and my main reason for the rating I assigned.

That good part of the movie has to be attributed to the direction, not the wirtting. The movie is dark and suspenseful. Though you do not know what really is transpiring in this movie, it does keep you on the edge of the seat as Senga tries to rescue her daughter.

This UK/Luxembourg film stars Madeleine Stowe as Senga, tired mother driving a car at midnight with her daughter Nat (Mischa Burton). They have been, it seems, on bad terms recently, and Senga is getting more and more nervous as they drive on.

But some curious and unnerving things happen to them on the way home, which they have to deal with on their own. For starters, one hichhiker (Bijou Phillips) came on board, and mystreiously disappears into the darkness. Then, after bitter argument with Nat, Senga finds her daughter missing, perhaps kidnapped, in the diner on the roadside.

[CREEPY ATMOSPHERE, AWFUL STORY] Like his previous supernatural horror 'Long Time Dead' Marcus Adams as director shows considerable skills to create creepy atmosphere on the screen. Though the picture is too dark at times (and almost all the events happen at one night), it also realizes certain amount of strangely unreal feeling of staying up late at 3pm in the morning.

But the script is simply awful, especially in the last 30 minutes, where everything is explained with cliched items like 'cult,' and everything still remains confusing and unbelievable. Norman Reedus plays a 'Recovery Man' whose identity turns out so incredible. And when Jonathan Rhys-Meyers appears as 'The Father' who utters incomprehensive nonsense before the bedazzled Nat (who listens to them seriously ... no kidding!), everything falls apart.

This film reminded me of Peter Fonda's 1975 shocker 'Ride with the Devil' in which four unsuspecting travellers are terrorized by the mysterious local cult group. Though that film was a B-action/horror film, it was at least coherent to the end. And the ending was more effective than this one's.

"Psychological thriller" is a phrase that gets thrown around a great deal these days regarding movies like this, and in most cases it's just a fancy way of saying "confusing and not very exciting." I'm happy to say that, in this case, it is a phrase which applies perfectly.

"Pulse" is not an easy film to encapsulate in a review like this. Anyone who's been on the road late at night, driving through exhaustion and roads that all look the same, will understand much of what this movie expresses. David Lynch fans will probably enjoy this film's creepy sense of surrealism, as will those who enjoy the Silent Hill game series.

The story centers around divorced mother Senga and her daughter Natasha, also known as Nat. Nat is 15 going on 30, and pushing hard against the bonds Senga tries to place on her. There are hints and suggestions of a troubled past for Senga which cause her to be more controlling than she might have to be, hints which are never fully resolved. Nat's rebellion finally sends her fleeing into the night at a rest area cafe, right into the waiting arms of a cult of young people who follow a mysterious "Father" figure.

The story itself is gripping, and the way its presented -- it all happens so quickly, in a single night -- is every parent's worst nightmare. What's more important to the film, though, is the establishment of the mindset of both mother and daughter. Senga, for example, takes pills at several points throughout the film, and while we never find out what those pills are for, we do see that the cult uses them to their advantage. Nat's troubled relationship with her mother seems typical, even superficial at first, but we get flashes that there are deeper problems for both lying under the surface.

And it's the mood of the film which really makes it worth watching. Throughout the movie we have the overall sense that something is not right. We don't know if this is Senga's perception, possibly distorted by lack of sleep and/or the pills she is taking, or if there really is something strange going on. Every shot seems tailored to the idea that there is something strange going on over this stretch of road.

This is not a film for those who like pat answers or stories which require no effort on the part of the audience. The filmmakers here clearly intended to challenge the audience, to make them question what they're seeing and wonder how much is imagined, and how much is real. Even the ending will likely leave you thinking, and wondering about what you saw.

It's that 3 AM feeling you get, when the world is just on the edge between the previous day and the next, when you get the sense that anything can happen. In "Pulse," maybe it does.

Sorry, but this movie stinks! The mother and daughter were a believable duo, but the plot line sucked. I just did not understand what the cult was about, and how the "Father" knew that the mother had wanted to abort her daughter.

While the movie started off well, somewhere close to the end, the plot stumbled and never recovered from its descent.

Too weird for me!

I went into this movie hoping for a trippy psychological thriller. Instead I got confused and bored, which was very disappointing because I liked the actors in the movie. The story is unclear and Jonathan Rhys Meyers is wasted! They never fully explain much of anything, so I recommend you watch paint dry instead.

Movie has some good actors and production values but the plot is impossible. The villians are unbelievable and contrived as some sort of blood sucking nihilists.You dont care about the characters. The only good parts are watching Madeline Stowe walk around a creepy diner. Great figure but that's all you will remember about this movie. This is a big 'SKIP IT'.