User reviews

An engaging riff on 90's style thrillers; maybe not Packard's best (that would be 'Reflections of Evil') but absolutely unique and certainly worth a look!

Don't feed this into your crappy old VCR after midnight! Watching a Damon Packard movie is like breaking your girl's compact mirror or deep frying that stray black cat lurking in the back alley. In other words, you will not have sex for at least seven years, run out of money faster than you can say American Express and kiss your cosmic karma goodbye as well while you're at it, why don't you? Less severe cases will move back in with their grandparents, others will straight-up opt for perpetual homelessness. There's no running from the Pulse, it will screw up your diet, it will wreck your tires, it will sully your laundry and misplace your toothpicks. It will mess with whatever little sanity you had left after Reagan's election. This is the Pulse. It's the fly in your ramen noodles and the splinter in your third eye. Every time you feel the Pulse a crooked cop is writing your next parking ticket and you just know that the landlady is already filing for eviction. Beware the Pulse, it will suck you into a maelstrom of eternal malaise. Run from the Pulse, your first class ticket for being jinxed into a second-rate loser. The Pulse will beat you into submission like a mindless bully who haunts, harasses and humiliates you with all the banalities of your daily struggle for survival. The Pulse is pulsating, like a Jane Fonda video on how to squat away your ever dwindling life force. The Pulse is harmful, the Pulse is addictive, soon you will find yourself compulsively crowdfunding the director's gold membership card at the all-night gym. You have been warned, do NOT excite Packard's Pulse!

Fatal Pulse is one of the most extraordinary indie films of the past ten years. It illustrates Damon Packard's maturity as a filmmaker, depicting a complex and elaborate scenario involving several major characters and interweaving all those peripheral flotsam which Packard is so good at peppering throughout his wholly unique art films.

As with every other major Packard film, Fatal Pulse is simultaneously an homage to, assault on and critique of that most ephemeral sociopolitical construct known as "consensus reality." Easily identifiable characters spout absurdist nonsense which both reflects and denies the time frame supposedly depicted in the story - in this case, somewhere in the nebulous 1990s - yet these confessions from Packard's gang of stoked-up sad sacks magnificently demolishes any palpable identification with that time period. The point being that people's lives are sacred, isolated, and intangible, and even though you may have existed in the 1990s, you never actually "lived through" that decade, that decade, like all others, being an entirely artificial construct. An identifiable cultural period, like any trend or even national identity, is an illusion, a dream, a delusion of "belonging" where none exists.

The individuals inhabiting Packard's assuredly damned cinematic universe are brutally isolated, assuring that meaningful emotional connection is elusive, if not impossible. The more shouting, moaning and partying they do, the more isolated are they in their own personal existential prisons. In short, everybody exists in his own little reality bubble, and the notion of "consensus reality" is a feeble attempt by our rulers to insist that we all share the same dreams, fears, goals and challenges. Nothing could be further from the truth, and Packard's characters in general, and in Fatal Pulse specifically, illustrate the fierce if problematic individualism of modern society brilliantly. Although hyper-ventilating characters yap endlessly in the gaudy, color-soaked mindscapes of a fallen America, Packard's cinematic universe is actually a very grim existential landscape of deep despair, daunting disillusion and demolished dreams; all of the shouting is really a cry of anguish.

What exemplifies the 1990s? Bad dance music? Delusional narcissists? Crappy faux-thrillers? Abundant drug use? The corporatization of New Hollywood? All of these things, and none, because individual characters live wholly outside these entirely facetious, phony "artifacts" clustered together and labeled (always after the fact) a "time period."

Fatal Pulse shows Packard's evolution as a filmmaker in several ways, the most important being his increasing ability to choreograph numerous actors in extended dramatic scenes with abundant, meaningful dialogue. Fatal Pulse is, in some ways, the most linear Packard film yet, but this does not mean, by any stretch of the imagination, that the film runs as a traditional narrative melodrama. Characters break stereotype with alarming glee and regularity, plot twists come crashing out of nowhere, and always in the background lurk metaphysical devils ready to invade and destroy any vile attempt by characters to settle into bland, middle-class conformity. If anything, in Fatal Pulse Packard mounts what at first appears to be a post-modern redux of a late-century TV thriller, only to mischievously undermine audience expectations at every turn, and creating - as with his other masterworks, Reflections of Evil and Foxfur - a stunningly unique film which cannot be compared to any other film ever made. In an era of ubiquitous indie film clones, the startling originality of Packard really means something, one reason why Packard may well be the only working genius in indie film today.

The "fatal pulse," of course, is the incessant beating of your heart, forcing you against your will to continue a meaningless yet torturous existence in an absurd world of bleak horrors. The Fatal Pulse, is the Terror of Life itself. Bravo.

Damon packard flick filled with all sorts of stars: sade Janet jackson billy friedkin... starts off a lil slow but then jumps off the deep end into what u would expect from packard: a paranoid absurd repetitive tacky sometimes boring/annoying surreal mess that makes u feel like ur on the crudest designer drugs ever made in a CIA lab. it's fun and aggravating dumb and interesting... but for the most part throws so much at u that he mostly pulls it off. not as good as reflections of evil (which had a direct n raw immediacy likely due to the fact that he couldnt extrapolate as much shooting on film)...its goodstuff if u like a lil pain with ur pleasure. also his lead who plays trent is really great and I hope he keeps working w damon and/or gets other work as well.

I am so happy to see so much imagination and creativity come together with an incredible cast! I have never seen a Twin Peaks, but from what I've read about it, this movie hits all the high points of originality that David Lynch achieved- dream-like, dense/layered, cerebral, and mysterious. I enjoyed the many references to familiar names, and few parts are hilarious. Definitely makes you think.