Reviewed - Pulse: HOLLYWOOD'S preoccupation with reworking Asian horror films - Dark Water, The Grudge and The Ring franchises - continues dismally unimaginatively with Pulse, a definitive example of a remake lost in translation.

Its basis is Kiyoshi Kurosawa's spooky 2001 Japanese thriller, Kairo, which recently went directly to DVD here, and the screenplay by Wes Craven and Ray Wright pares the original down to its narrative bones.

Craven had planned to direct Pulse before the assignment went to Jim Sonzero, whose dire movie exhibits no discernible flair for the genre or the medium. His remake builds entirely unconvincingly to no less than an apocalypse for our planet, triggered when Josh (Jonathan Tucker), a university student, hacks into one computer too many, unleashing a ghostly force.

After Josh kills himself, his girlfriend (Kristin Bell) sets about solving the mystery with the help of a moody, stubbly slacker (Ian Somerhalder) who declares he has "a procrastination problem". The movie itself has far more serious problems, beginning with its dated technophobia.

The early scenes are obsessed with drawing attention to the prominence of technology in the lives of its vapid teens - through computers, music downloads, mobile phones, text messaging - as if this were some kind of revelation. And Josh even uses a phone cable to hang himself. Pulse then gets all paranoid about the internet, but what follows is exceedingly tedious and registers as merely silly.

None of the cardboard characters is even vaguely interesting, so it's hard to a care a whit about what horrible fate awaits them. The director's notion of creating tension amounts to little more than turning up the shrill soundtrack music, laying on some risibly tacky sound effects, and subjecting his clunky footage to desperately frantic over-editing.