PULSE: Straight from the Video Shelf to Your Home

PULSE (Blu-ray)

1988 / 92 min

Alliance Entertainment

Review by Josey, the Sudden Cat🙀

There’s kind of a sad story behind this one. Upon completion, 1988's Pulse was slated for a wide theatrical release. But after a changing of the guard at Columbia Pictures, it was dumped into a couple of theaters before going straight to video. Kind of a shame, really. This largely forgotten film was nothing groundbreaking, but certainly deserved a more dignified fate than fighting for shelf space with low budget Friday the 13th rip-offs.

If nothing else, the movie boasts a pretty cool antagonist…some kind of entity or creature made of pure electricity that infiltrates peoples homes and tries to kill them. It’s nicely rendered, too. Perhaps taking a cue from The Thing, it appears as pulsating pieces of goo that collectively take over the home’s electronics, outlets and wiring. But best of all, writer-director Paul Golding doesn’t feel compelled to provide any explanation. It’s enough that the house suddenly has it in for its occupants.

Shoulda paid your cable bill, Bill.

Those occupants are the Rockland family, Bill (Cliff De Young), his wife Ellen (Roxanne Hart), and son from a previous marriage, David (Joey Lawrence), who’s visiting from Colorado. However, he’d rather be back home, partially because Dad’s too busy to spend time with him, but mostly because he’s afraid that the same unseen presence that recently killed a neighbor has found its way into their house. He’s right, of course, otherwise no movie. Dad, however, needs more convincing. But don’t all horror movie dads?

The only exposition regarding the presence is provided by Old Man Holger (Charles Tyner), but all he actually tells David is how it moves from house to house through power lines. And really, that's all David (and the audience) needs to know. This sets up some pretty neat sequences with the family being terrorized and attacked by the stuff in their house, rendered through interesting special effects. None of this is particularly scary, but there’s some genuine suspense here and there.

Featuring a cast of faces you know but whose names you probably don’t (save for little Joey, who’d later become a teen idol that some of you may have had on your bedroom wall), Pulse is a quaint but entertaining little curio from the horror section of the ‘80s mom & pop video stores we used to haunt.

This is a re-issue of a Blu-ray first released by Mill Creek Entertainment in 2017.