The Gospel According to Prisco

If I haven’t mentioned it before, I wanted to see the movie, Pulse, but I didn’t know which one it was, and there were like seven of them on Netflix, so I intermittenly rented several of them.  This was the one I wanted to see, the original Japanese version of the movie.  Upon taking a well-earned sick day, I was sitting about the apartment, surfing the Sundance On Demand, and saw it, so I watched it. 

Ugh.  What a dreadful movie. 

I’m usually all for Japanese horror, but I’m learning that it’s not all done properly.  So it makes sense that most horror movies suck ass today.  Like Ben Silverman of NBC, we’re stealing ideas wholesale from overseas and then gussying them up and tarting them out as terrible if not worse so.  So it’s not a guarantee that just because it’s J-Horror, it’s gonna be awesome. 

Pulse is about a mysterious “ghost in the machine” that spreads like a virus, causing normal people to just shut down and then eventually kill themselves or disappear.   It’s incredibly murky and confusing, and the characters (and this is probably my inadvertent racism shining forth) are indistinguishable and interchangable.  So most of the movie is spent trudging along, not knowing what the hell is going on, just seeing a lot of creepy overdark shots of people walking slowly in the background and not saying anything.  Then when the action finally picks up, at that point, you just don’t care.  I guess it’s a commentary on the dystopian future of a technologically obsessed society, but there are better and more interesting ways to make that point. 

Oh, boy, I can’t wait to see the American remake.  Fuck me with a spoon.

So upon rejoining my Netflix account, I was immediately sent my first four films.  I didn’t remember what they were about or what they featured.  Just that I tend to like to watch a lot of cheesy horror, particularly Japanese. 

The first four I got sent to me were: MPD Psycho, Venom, Pulse, and The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi.  Oh, where to begin?

I actually turned off MPD Psycho, which must have been a moment of weakness in which I clicked one of those “If You Liked, then…”  I can’t imagine what I liked that was comparable to this.  It sounded promising: a detective with multiple personality disorder who stalks a killer who shows signs of his own MPD.  It must have been some sort of Japanese serial drama.  All the violence and nudity was blurred out with static shots.  That bugged me out.  Then things just kind of happened out of nowhere.  It might have been based on a manga.  It would be like trying to watch the unedited versions of the game show that MXC is based on, and without the commentary.  I didn’t make it past Episode 2.

Then there was Venom.  I think I was on a Bijou Phillips kick and rented some of her stuff to see if my new theory applied.  It seemed like Bijou got crazy naked in Bully and Havoc but then decided that she was a serious actress, or that we’ve all seen enough of her credge and boytits, or else age and heroin are catching up to her and she’s not as hot as once she was (for real, you think we want to see Heather “Dawn Weiner” Matarazzo’s Tarazzo’s, but then you just get a drillbit shave in Hostel 2?).  So I got two horror films.  This was the first.

Um, Venom is about a shitty New Orleans town, and the old voodoo lady who traps killers souls in snakes.  Then she gets into a car wreck and the creepy tow truck driver gets mauled by the snakes and then comes back as Mr. Jangles, because his keys jangle.  Nobody ever once refers to him by this name.  Ever.  The only place you see it is on the Netflix sleeve.  Mr. Jangles has to kill everyone because it’s a horror movie, not out of any sort of legitimate motivation.  And he kills everyone with a crowbar.  I could see one person, mabye two.  But everyone?  You suck.

I can imagine this being pitched as gritty and cultural, because it deals with voodoo.  Like whenever there are more than three black people in a movie and they call it “urban” and stop spelling words correctly in the title.  This is about as voodoo as an episode of Scooby Doo.  The killer is lame, the actors are incredibly lame, and the murders aren’t even that gory. 

Then we’ve got Pulse which I think is a remake of Pulse which was a remake of Pulse.  I’ve got about three titles on Netflix marked “Pulse”.  I heard about a movie Pulse that was supposedly pretty good.  I’m pretty fucking sure this was not it. 

Madeline Stowe plays Mischa Barton’s mom, and they pick up a creepy hitchhiker (Bijou!) who turns out to be part of a cult.  Snotty Mischa runs away with them at a truck stop, and then Madeline Stowe has to go hunt her down.  I think the director dropped a whole lotta acid and then watched Breakdown with Kurt Russell and then tried to recreate what he saw with a camcorder.  Not only is this the most poorly lit piece of crap ever made, it has the nerve to have Jonathan Rhys-Meyers in it, it what was surely a bid to derail his career.  The movie devolves into this trippy hippy shit that’s worse, WORSE, than The Tripper.  And that killer was a guy in a Ronald Reagan mask chopping hippies with an axe.  For reals. 

The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi.  Well, this was the best of the lot.  But not as good as I had hoped it would be.  It was my fault for having gotten done watching so much Kurosawa.  When his samurais cut people, blood flies.  There was this weird digitalized blood in this movie.  But not as much as I had wanted there to be.  There’s a reason I like Kill Bill.  And that reason is buckets of blood.  All I ask is if you kill someone with a sword, knock off a limb or head or at the very least, spray a whole lot of blood.  I don’t want historical or anatomical accuracy.  I want a high body count and smeary red lens. 

At least it ended with a dance number.  That’s also a requirement for any decent movie.   Here’s looking at you, Stephen Chow.