By Stephen Hunter
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, August 12, 2006

"Pulse" put me in mind of the bride's whimsy on what was necessary for a happy wedding: "Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue." The question is: Will it help a horror movie?

Something old: Ghosts who pop out of nowhere and fright you bad! Creaky doorways. Squeaky stairway. Dirty floors. Unmade beds! Shadowy passages through basements of crummy buildings. An ominous soundtrack of unexplained noises that resemble a running toilet in the world's largest snare drum. Dogs and cats, living together!

Something new: Well, it's pretty new, though movies in which computers are the conduit between worlds have been made before. This one, however, does it quite well. It makes us feel the presence of the Net, and it uses the frightful conceit of that tool as a means for an invasion of creatures who look like us after a Japanese avant-garde redesign -- sort of cadaverous and smeary and crackly all at once. The best of these new forms appears to be an 14-foot-tall, eight-armed bald guy who pops out of a dryer in a campus basement. And here my biggest computer worry was that the box would go down before I hit "Save" and I would lose all this deathless prose!

Something borrowed: Well, actually, the whole movie is borrowed. It's an Americanized version of the 2001 Japanese film written and directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa. That film, which I saw but neglected to remember in any detail, was about a circle of Japanese students who are stalked one by one by these same strange beings from inside the machine. The Japanese twist was that the beings didn't kill the students by external violence: Rather, they caused them to commit suicide. The movie featured several blisteringly realistic self-executions, suicide being something of an obsession in Japanese culture. But the whole thing was a lot hazier, while American director Jim Sonzero has taken the same campus setting and plot and added some rationale by "science-fictioning" it.

The Japanese are much more comfortable with the unexplained and the irrational; one of their national masterpieces is the 1960s "Kaidan," four ghost stories by the great Masaki Kobayashi. My dim memories of the original "Pulse" insist that it was left opaque and unexplained, and that was a part of its power (as it is of all the recent J-horror remakes, like "The Ring" and "The Grudge").With Sonzero, there's no spiritual dimension (as there was in the Japanese variant), but rather one of those '50s monster-movie riffs: Computer scientists in the basement lab developed a program that tapped into a whole new range of frequencies they thought they could control, not knowing that a computer geek had hacked into their system, and through him, the virus was released upon the world. Before he died, he developed an anti-virus, and -- in the best American tradition but the most nonexistent Japanese one -- his girlfriend, Mattie (Kristen Bell of TV's "Veronica Mars") and her new boyfriend, Dexter (Ian Somerhalder, with runway-quality cheekbones behind the stubble) try to feed it into a computer before the world finishes ending.

Something blue: That also would be the whole movie. For no doubt highly serious artistic reasons, Sonzero has instructed his team to give the whole thing a blue tint, as if it's happening in the glow of a computer screen or a television. The whole damn movie is in Picasso's blue period, and poor Bell goes down as the first blue-blond heroine in movie history. Loved her blue eyes, too, but the blue nose? Not for moi . Sonzero leaves the BIV sector of the spectrum just for a second or two when some of the kids learn that red tape can keep the digital haunts out, and so we get 30 or 40 seconds of red-eye photography.

Sonzero moves the material away from Japan's melancholy preference for bitter, tragic endings and finds some hope for a new world aborning out of the chaos he chronicles.

The movie is far from great, but it certainly holds your attention. And I have to say the "science-fictioning" works, at least in the following sense. While the appeal of the Japanese horror films may well be their opaqueness and their lack of Western rationality, those attributes don't translate well to these shores. Thus, when "The Ring" or "The Grudge" are remade by Western filmmakers with the Japanese sensibility left intact, many in the audience here are unsettled by the vagueness of it all and the lack of tangible explanation. Sonzero and his writers have taken the conceit of the original Japanese film and grafted a Western rationale on it -- depending on your perspective, you could say they've either fixed or broken it -- and for someone with a rigid set of logic-circuit expectations (moi again), it works much more satisfyingly that way.

Pulse (91 minutes, at area theaters) is rated PG-13 for some intense terror, adult themes and disturbing imagery.