Thursday night I came home from eating dinner, and my keeper, Raymond had a new DVD to watch, called 'Impulse'. It was a story about this college age computer programmer who liked writing and spreading viruses. (Not for his own computer, of course, but rather for everyone else's computers.
A moody, melancholy guy, he decided to commit suicide. In doing so, he released a lot of evil spirits from his mind and body. These evil spirits learned how to communicate with others of their own kind _and real, human people_ using the computer, you know, using Instant Messenger and Email, IRC, stuff like that. This guy was a computer science major at college, specializing in 'telecom'. He had vast amounts of knowledge in subjects like WiFi, cell phones, land line phones, and the computers behind them. Natually, all this guy's knowledge about these subjects were transmitted on to the evil spirits, and soon they knew how to spread themselves around the world after reading the 'telecom paper' this guy had written.
We see signs of the evil spirits learing how to use these computers, with messages saying 'please help me' appearing spuriously on the various terminal screens. Then it appears that no matter what anyone does, the hard drives cannot be cleaned off, and computers boot up with a dreadful movie entitled 'Watch me commit suicide' and the man killing himself.
Soon, every computer everywhere was plugged up with these evil spirit viruses, but in particular, all cell phones, landline phones, instant message programs, and land line phones were clogged up with them. How badly plugged up? To illustrate this, a multi-line phone is displayed with the ringing of phone bells in the background and all the lines flashing and going unanswered; people nearby were seated at computer terminals getting nowhere, and a recorded message voice is repeating over and over, "Your call has been received by 911. All operators are busy assisting other callers. Please hold until a 911 operator is available."
The obligatory characters included the police and their investigation, of course, the dull college professor who kept denying that evil spirits could exist, two other sort of half-witted college students in the same computer science class, and other assorted characters.
One of them found a script, which it was stated, could be run and eliminate the viruses. But it had to be run 'from the server' which as luck would have it, was down in the basement of the 'Computer Science Department' building at the university. 'Crash all the terminals, shut down the servers, load this script then restart it all' is what they had to do.
Well, our hero and heroine (two of the college students) decide to try this and they rush to the basement. But alas, they are too late, as the worm-like evil spirit viruses have escaped and are now in the process of infesting the entire internet. They do not say exactly where all this is located, but New York City is implied as the location of 'the university'. As the viruses infest all computers everywhere, we see the results in the form of clogged streets and stalled subways, lights flashing or not working at all. A television news station is telling everyone about this dillema when it, itself suddenly shuts down.
Our hero and heroine consult again with the police and are told to flee for their lives, because it appears everyone is following the example of the computer science student and committing suicide. They decide to take that advice and get out of the city as soon as they can, driving off to some rural countryside area. We can tell it is a rural area because we see cows and horses, and the heroine is telling us that 'the things we thought were to help us are actually killing us; driving us to the brink of insanity.' Both hero and heroine swore they would never again use a telephone, a cell phone, Wi-Fi, instant messaging or any 'computer', because of the evil spirit viruses which had taken over the entire thing at this point.
Raymond said to me the whole movie ("Impulse") stunk very badly. I would generally agree, but one *good* thing about the movie was it was done in black and white with interesting contrasts in what we saw. Black and white, with flourescent lights flashing off and on at the right intervals, dashes of blue and grey in the scenes and quite good sound and music effects.
Raymond noted the movie ended 'a lot like 28 Days' (if you have seen that movie), where the surviviors never actually win, but they instead just flee the big city and move to a safe, rural area.
Not a bad deal for a $4.00/week rental from Blockbuster.
PAT