My review was written in December 1988 after watching the movie on RCA/Columbia video cassette.
"Pulse" is a superior sci-fi thriller that finds horror in the context of everyday electrical appliances gone amuck.
Pic received only a token theatrical release last March by Columbia, duly protested by the filmmakers, but will find an appreciative audience on the rebound (now in home video release) among genre buffs.
Opening scenes are most disquieting, as the man next door to happy suburban couple Cliff De Young and Roxanne Hart goes crazy one night and destroys his home, with all the neighbors watching helplessly. De Young's son Joey Lawrence comes to L. A. from his mom's place in Colorado to spend the summer and understandably is apprehensive as stepmom Hart shows him the house's protective devices, including prison-like bars which snap shut in front of the living room's picture window.
Paranoia, described here as merely "heightened awareness", soon takes hold of the kid as writer-director Paul Golding carefully develops a host of small details into a convincing pattern of technology gone haywire. Tantalizing (but left ambiguous to spur the viewer's imagination) sci-fi explanation is that sudden pulses of electricity have altered the appliances in several homes as if some alien force were communicating destructive messages to the Earthly machinery. An old coot (ably played by Charles Tyler) tells the boy this tle and gradually it seems credible.
Surefire format of "boy who cried wolf", as no one believes Joey's fears, extends well to Hart finally coming around (but put out of commission in a scalding shower scene) and then dad De Young joining up with Joey to fight the "possessed" house in a harrowing finale. It's scary and easy to identify with, especially Golding's plot point that consumers (and repairemne alike) know little of the workings of faulty equipment and are a bit uneasy at those mysterious noises emitted at night by furnaces, refrigerators, etc.
Cast, especially young Joey Lawrence, is quite effective in making one believe in the far-fetched. Pic is extremely well photographed, with kudos to Peter Lyons Collister and others, plus eerie macro photography of circuit boards with solder bubbling and other extreme closeup work by Oxford Scientific Films (ace lense Haskell Wexler gets a thank you credit as well).
