Pulse 2: Afterlife – The Official Scape Review

Pulse 2: Afterlife drops you right in the thick of the nightmarish and post-apocalyptic world where Pulse 1 left you – in a seat, watching a Pulse movie. At the end of the first Pulse, the cities of the world belong to the spirits that are somehow able to travel through electrical waves and infect humans with a “virus” that not only kills them, but leaves them in a purgatory-like state for all eternity where are doomed to repeat the way they died over and over again on Earth while looking like they’re reruns on an old television. The people who are still alive can protect themselves by putting red electrical tape on windows and staying away from areas with cellular phone reception. Other than the fact that they don’t seem to figure out that they just need to tear down the power lines, this film doesn’t make any sense to someone who didn’t go in knowing all of this – and that is perhaps its biggest problem.

This film presupposes a lot of knowledge on the audience’s part about the world they set up in the first film. We start off in an apartment complex with people that have gone insane, a person draped completely in red, avoiding the spirits that have plagued and now control the town where he lives. He is spotted by a spirit and nothing really happens – the credits roll. This is not a way to introduce someone to a film, even if it is operating under the guise that it is a sequel. Being a sequel is no excuse for bad storytelling. You need a setup, you need characters to guide you through that setup and you need to follow through on the natural flow and direction of your story. This film does none of these things.

Jamie Bamber (Captain Apollo form Battlestar Galactica) stars as a father, we are introduced to in this film, of a girl he gains custody of after he and his wife split up. The woman kills herself later because of this and her spirit is the main antagonist of the film – trying to exact revenge on the man that scorned her in life. It seems like a very myopic story to tell in a world where humans have been completely eradicated from the Earth save for a few survivors. Do we really care about characters we have never seen or heard of enough to follow them through an entire journey in this world we barely know? Apparently this film thought we did.

I would have wanted to see what happened to the character in the first film who lost her lover – or at least the survivor community that she might have found. I want to see humans living in this world, what they are like and what drives each of them to act in the way they do that is representative of their surroundings. I want human drama told in a Lord of the Flies-esque setting where you find out the best and worst of those around you when you are getting picked off by your own loved ones. How cool is that? The Pulse people are operating under a completely doable premise, and it doesn’t even have to cost that much or look that good. They don’t have to go to the lengths that they did in this installment (there is a Pulse 3 coming out next year) – for example: green-screening a cabin. I swear to God the cabin in this movie is green screened, and if this is true, this is absolutely ridiculous. You can’t find a set of a cabin? Anyway, the disappointment lies in the potential of the premise. This is what you wanted at the end of the last one, if you wanted anything other than to leave, and it is not delivered in this second installment.

We don’t get to know the characters too well beyond that the father is about as good at parenting as Tom Cruise was in War of the Worlds, and that the girl misses her mother. He tries to bring her back to a community of survivors living in the woods, well beyond the reach of any cell phone reception (apparently the entire Earth has switched to Sprint in this world). They almost shoot his daughter because she looks like she might have the disease that caused all of this chaos to begin with. Bamber’s character shows them that it is dirt and they move on. This is about as much depth as we get into the minds of the characters in this film. As the storyline unravels, we see Bamber’s character go through zero transformation, and the daughter not get anything but angry.

The payoff of this story is a conclusion that is very much a “horror movie ending”. Now, I’m not one for happy endings, and I really do love films and stories that have something so poignant to say, that it can only be said in a down-ending or a quick punch in the face from “reality”. This film doesn’t do that. It completely violates the direction it was going in – the glimpse of character relationship development that we got throughout the film was completely destroyed, and we seem to be back to square one, having learned nothing, and gained nothing out of the entire experience that we didn’t get from the last film. It was pointless and did not amount to anything of value.

I love horror movies. I love crappy horror movies. I love movies that go off the deep end and allow you to just take them in and have fun. I love just enjoying the ride of a horrible train-wreck of a film and enjoying it with a few drinks and a few friends. This film wasn’t even fun “bad”. It was just pointless, so I am very much not judging against the best films of the year, but against any other straight-to-video sequels to mediocre American remakes of Japanese horror movies. It did not measure up, sadly, because Jamie Bamber really did a great job. He did as well as he could with the tools he was given and somehow drew a character out of this under-written and poorly scripted father. Great job, Mr. Bamber, everyone makes these movies, because  hey, they’ve got bills to pay, and our opinions have not changed about you and we still admire your range and skill. He really was the best part of this movie. I don’t blame him. I blame the writer/director, but what more could anyone really expect from the director of the the fourth and fifth installments of the Prophecy sequels?

This movie is a waste of time. There is no tension, there are no scary moments, there is nothing that could possibly make you care about the characters enough to really build any kind of real fear, and it was a horrible waste of a perfectly good premise. There is a surprisingly good performance from Jamie Bamber with what he was given. – no matter what you do for a living. Not highly recommended. 

Pulse 2: Afterlife is available now on DVD from Dimension Extreme! and available for giveaway for the first person to email me at gilmore@geekscape.net.