PULSE 2: AFTERLIFE is a sequel to the remake of a Japanese ghost film. The Japanese film was great, a fine little slow burner, which is why I'm subjecting myself to these American versions of the tale. I wonder why I bother when the film is of the quality of PULSE 2, which is as awful an attempt at a horror movie as you're likely to get.

The story is about characters who find themselves pursued by the dead who can now appear thanks to wireless communication devices. What this boils down to is a never-ending storyline of a father and his daughter who find themselves pursued by the spirit of the girl's dead mother. The CGI ghost effects are awful, like something out of THE RING remake where the ghost girl comes out of the TV, but even worse are the endless CGI background to almost every scene.

Why shoot the whole film on a green screen, 300-style? It makes everything look fake and unrealistic, and to compound this the acting is poor and the characters one-dimensional. Scares? Try elsewhere, you won't find any here.

In the intro we meet some guy all dressed in red including using red dye in his eyes. He walks around town and runs into digital souls.

Then we meet a woman surrounded by ash. She realizes her daughter is missing. She starts looking for her everywhere, but everyone acts weird, even a little girl who's supposed to be her daughter.

Then we meet the husband/dad. He too is looking for the girl. When he finds her, he takes her to the woods were folks are trying to keep the disease away. The disease is something that turns your veins black and kills you and has affected the entire country. His mistress also ends up at the cabin. When he starts reading emails from the wife, the mistress catches the disease and infects some other guy.

Meanwhile dad and daughters are on the run and meet red guy who forces him to take some piece of electronics that according to red guy will save the world.

Mom shows up again to take the daughter but dad saves the girl. Eventually a bus shows up that take people to a refuge camp.

I didn't see Pulse 1, but more or less knew what it was about based on the trailer. The premise is a good one. Dead people live in this digital limbo, they are alone and hang around the world eating people's souls. What they get from it though isn't explained. Pulse 2 could have done a lot with that idea. But instead because of a small budget I presume, focuses on this one completely uninteresting family. There is no reason for the audience to care about any of them. At first it deceives us by focusing on the mom, who turns out to be one of these digital zombies interacting with a bunch of mental zombies. Unfortunately when our main characters are the living, things are still lame. The pace and tone of this movie are super dull. I fell asleep near the end. Even terror scenes are filmed in such a boring way. But that's the problem when you have a short script and have to make a 1:30 long movie out of it. Another problem with having no budget is that they chose to film the entire movie in front of a green screen. An interesting choice during the scenes where the digital zombie is the center of the action. But for the rest of the movie not so much. A shame that this movie isn't better. The basic idea really lends itself for some good movies.

Do not see this movie. There, I warned you. It is an absolute pile of garbage. I'm not even talking about the plot, story, screen writing or the acting, I am talking about the way the film was shot. The entire thing is shot in a sound studio next to a blue screen. The first minute of this film look creepy and promising. What follows is an absolute disaster. The actors are not even interacting with one another. It is glaringly obvious that one actor was shot doing his or her part in front of a blue screen, then another, then another, then it was all layered together. None of the actors are even looking at one another because they are not there. This movie sucked, and it looked like hell. What a waste of time and money.