Cliff De Young, Joey Lawrence and Roxanne Hart star in this 1988 sci-fi/horror film. This starts with Bill Rockland (De Young), his wife, Ellen (Hart) and neighbors witnessing a man on their street killed in a mysterious accident. Lawrence (Summer Rental) plays Bill's son, David who visits him from Colorado and also gets to know Ellen. Soon, David hears about the accident on the street and starts hearing strange noises in the house at night. He becomes terrorized by an electrical force called, a "pulse" causing the noises. David tries explaining to Bill and Ellen what's happening, but Bill doesn't believe him. Ellen does and fears that the evil force is trying to harm them. After Ellen gets into an accident, Bill starts to believe what's happening and tries to stop the pulse with David's help. I remember this used to be on TV years ago and always thought it was creepy. Jay Ferguson's score is also chilling and I recommend this good 80's sci-fi/horror flick.

This film had great potential but ended up being a mediocre 'X Files episode'. There were interesting ideas about the sentience of machines and technology running amok but these were never fully explored. the acting was slightly above average for a dtv and the director did a good job of injecting an element of mysterious tension to the proceedings. Some elements however, were wasted completely, such as the shots of circuitry melting in to one another in the TV, making connections and forming an intelligence. The idea that appliances we use daily are increasingly getting sophisticated and most of use have little idea how they work and what they could be capable of becoming was mentioned briefly by the TV repair man but frustratingly never matured in to anything. However the decision to make the 'pulse' homicidal for no reason made little sense. Wouldn't somebody in government have noticed this by now ( or were we supposed to believe the patrolling police were 'in on it') and investigated the street?. A better idea would have been a govt 'A.I' got loose and in to the Grid and started growing and learning and developing in to something ...just an idea but they could have done much better with this plot imo.

I was expecting more from this, even though it was just PG-13. I thought a number of houses were involved, or at least a number of deaths in one house (to sound a bit morbid). However, there's one death in the backstory and one offscreen death. Apart from that, just injuries.Not much explanation is given for why electricity is going bad, or why just in one house at a time, all in one neighborhood. Or if the electricity isn't really going bad and it's just bad workmanship.The scariest thing about the movie is the bowl cut hairstyles of the Lawrence brothers. Egads!

Pulse starts in an ordinary L.A. street which is disturbed by the antics of one of it's residents named Hank Jordan who is wrecking his house with a baseball bat, the police are called & break into Hank's house but find him dead. Young David Rockland (Joseph Lawrence) is flying into L.A. from Colorado to spend some time with his Father & Stepmother Bill (Cliff De Young) & Ellen (Roxanne Hart), things go well at first but one night when David is left home alone the T.V. & other various electrical appliances seem to take a life of their own & after almost being burned alive by a pilot light David is understandably nervous. Then David hears about the stories concerning the Jordan's & what happened, David becomes convinced that there is an evil presence in his Father's house that will try to kill them, at first Bill isn't having any of it but as the mysterious 'accidents' begin to add up he starts to change his mind...Written & directed by Paul Golding I thought Pulse was an average horror/thriller that never even came close to getting my pulse racing. The script doesn't seem to know what it wants to be or who it wants to appeal too & is loose to say the least, nothing is explained in any sort of detail. What the evil electrical force is or where it came from or what it's trying to do, absolutely nothing about it is revealed. I also think that Pulse will disappoint most potential viewers in the sense that as a fan of horror films which Pulse supposedly is I was expecting a widespread outbreak of electrical devices turning against their owners all across America but in actual fact the pulse never leaves the confines of one house even though it could go anywhere & it doesn't kill a single person on screen, that's right not one person is killed in Pulse which just isn't good enough as far as I'm concerned. Instead director Golding thinks his audience would rather sit through chunks of boring dialogue, stupid unexplained narrative & an annoying teenage kid as the lead, well Mr. Golding I can tell you now that most horror fans like films which are scary & contain some semblance of horror. As it is Pulse tells it's story competently enough despite it's lack of any explanations & while there's nothing spectacular about it it's an OK way to pass 90 odd minutes if you don't expect too much.Director Golding films everything without much style or visual flair but there are a few really effective scenes in which his camera goes 'into' the electrical equipment & there are some nice close-up shots of the circuit boards & wiring as the pulse melts the solder & rearranges it for reasons I'm not sure about, these shots are easily the most memorable thing about Pulse which says it all really. Pulse isn't scary & there's not much of a horror atmosphere to it either. There are some really dumb bits at the end when David a young kid manages to stop his Father falling back by grabbing him even though his Father probably weighs three times that of David, it wouldn't work in reality would it? Neither can I forget the scene when a circular saw manages to fire a screw at Bill & hit him in the forehead! Forget about any proper gore, someone's hand gets cut, someone is burnt & a screw hits someone's forehead is all we get.Technically Pulse is alright, there's nothing really wrong with it. The acting is OK but again nothing special, Lawrence as the young kid gets very irritating.Pulse is an OK film, I'm sure there are people out there who will like it but for me it was too dull, it never explained itself & the decision not to kill anyone during the entire duration of the film was a bad one, a very bad one. There are better films out there.