• Written and directed by Paul Golding
• Starring
  • Cliff De Young
  • Roxanne Hart
  • Joey Lawrence
  • Matthew Lawrence

Kill your TV.

That’s the message I get from too many ’80s movies, given the number of things that live in them, travel from them, or watch you from them in movies. Of course, the fact that I watch all these cautionary tales on my television kind of gives me a mixed message…

In this case, it’s not just the TV that’s affected. It’s every dang appliance in the house, plus everything else that’s conductive.

Kill your house, then. Before it kills you.

Bill and Ellen (Cliff De Young and Roxanne Hart) wake up in the middle of the night to the sound of Mr. Jordan across the street trashing his house like a crazy man; the police enter to find him electrocuted in a puddle of water.

Naturally, because this is suburbia, everything returns to normal in just under eighteen minutes; by the next week, it’s almost a distant memory, which is just great, because next week is when eleven-year-old David (a very young Joey Lawrence) comes to stay with his Dad and get used to his new wife. But the security bars on the windows of Dad’s home disturb him, as does the normal ambiguity of having a substitute mother here and a real one in Colorado.

And the fact that the TV starts wigging out on him doesn’t help.

We’re kept solidly in PG-13 territory here, largely because of the age of our protagonist; the American public has a real problem with seeing children in real scary jeopardy. But that means that, for most of the movie, we never pass the level of “vaguely ominous” happenings. Neighbor kid Stevie (Joey’s brother Matthew) tells him all about Mr. Jordan, and how his wife was killed by the disposal, and how the grass started dying around his house; David sees the same thing happening around his own house. A spooky old man in the Jordan house (Charles Tyner, who runs neck-and-neck with the geezer from Poltergeist 2 for sheer spooky-assness) spouts off to him about “the voices in the wires” and other paranoid mutterings.

It seems it’s some kind of, well, sentient pulse of electricity. It did in Mr. Jordan first; now it seems to inhabit the transformer between the houses, or something.

None of the characters are terribly charismatic, but the parents are just what you’d expect. Cliff De Young has two roles he habitually plays: the asshole nebbish, and the not-so-much-an-asshole nebbish. Here, he’s a pretty mild iteration of the latter, trying honestly to get to know his son again while being distracted by work and Male Answer Syndrome. He, of course, is the last family member to be convinced of the reality of this “thing”; he gets the lines like, “You want me to believe that the electricity in our house is trying to kill us?” (At least the phrase “there must be a rational explanation” never passes his lips.)

Roxanne Hart has aged a few years since Highlander, and lost some of the cute perkiness, but she still does “harried panic” well, which is probably why she was cast. In fact, as she was just getting worked up for action, it’s a shame she was removed from the story by a freak boiling shower “accident.” (Don’t worry, she’s okay; she just ends up in the hospital for the rest of the running time and thus misses the climax.)

Really, the biggest problem is the “pulse” itself: We never really figure out if it’s malevolent per se, or if it’s just trying to protect itself somehow, or has some other purpose. The first is ruled out by the movie rule that it must first cause minor annoyances (shorting the TV set, playing with the thermostat) to subtly deadly (splitting the gas pipes, heating the shower to scalding) to full-out (live electricity, setting the whole damned house on fire). But again, if it’s just trying to protect itself, why does it fuse the TV so it only shows the Home Shopping Network? And why would a creature of electricity, which can move about at will, stick around a transformer box in suburbia and make its presence known so dang slowly?

SF writer John Varley wrote an award-winning story called “Press Enter” that appeared in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine in 1984; in it, a malevolent computer entity generated by the millions of personal computers in the nation was able to take over much like this “pulse,” right down to being able to enter a house through the metal piping. The similarities only make me wish that Pulse had been made a decade later, when the networked computer is such a part of life that such a pulse would have had a field day. Perhaps it’s time for writer-director Paul Golding to make Pulse 2.

Kill your Compaq.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 1
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 2
• ominous thunderstorms: 1
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 3
  • Cliff De Young played the alien “Croden” in the 1st season DS9 episode “Vortex”
  • Michael Rider (the foreman on the Jordan house) appeared on TNG four times, three as transporter chief and once as a security guard (guess he got demoted)
  • Tim Russ (one of the policemen) guested on TNG and cameoed in Generations before landing the role of “Tuvok” on Voyager