A little boy battles appliances, pipes, and wiring in his step-mother's house in 1988's Pulse. I recommend not reading the plot synopsis on Wikipedia because it provides an explanation for the supernatural events in the film that the film itself does not provide. One of the reasons the movie works so remarkably well is its deliberate avoidance of straight forward explanation.
Little David (Joey Lawrence) is already stressed out by the uncomfortable situation of staying with his dad (Cliff De Young) and his dad's new wife, Ellen (Roxanne Hart), at their Los Angeles home. He'd rather be back home in Colorado. But a strange situation is about to get even stranger.
A man across the street is seen beating the crap out of his furniture before all goes silent. The police walk in to find a man apparently dead by power drill, presumably by his own hand. David starts talking to another kid on the street--another nice thing about this movie is, even though the kids are cute, the movie never makes too much of it, it treats them as people with feelings and information to share. This other kid tells David about how the dead man used to accuse the kids of poisoning his lawn.
David breaks into the house and encounters a strange old man in a fedora who provides an explanation for what David's already starting to experience with electricity in his father's house. But this old man also seems pretty off and later we learn he also has a bomb shelter. Is he really giving us an explanation or is he just another guy bewildered, only a little more confident about articulating his suppositions?
"Lovecraftian" is a word that gets overused but this is a real, genuine example of that quality of menacing ambiguity that distinguishes so much of Lovecraft's work. This movie's got it.
No comments:
Post a Comment