“What happened?” says one character at the end of Pulse. “I don’t know,” the other replies. They’re presumably talking, in the most immediate sense, about an attack on their persons, but any movie that includes that sort of exchange in its climax runs the risk of looking like it’s attempting to wrap dialogue-as-masking-tape around a gaping, mortal, narrative wound. And that’s certainly just the case with Pulse, as that breathless banter will actually just about adequately sum up an audience’s feeling about this noisy, melodramatic and ultimately anonymous thriller, destined to find its way to bargain bins posthaste.

Part of the ongoing Stateside trend of remakes of more elliptical, psychologically rooted J-horror pictures, Pulse takes its basic premise from Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s recent import Kairo, but presses it into much more of a standardized template. The movie centers on college student Mattie Webber (Veronica Mars’ Kristen Bell) and her friends (a group that includes Christina Milian, Rick Gonzalez and Samm Levine), who must collectively cope with the sudden suicide of their friend Josh (Jonathan Tucker), who is also Mattie’s recent ex.

When Mattie receives a series of posthumous e-mails from Josh asking for help, she’s understandably freaked. She unplugs her computer, but her printer starts spitting out pages too. At first it’s hypothesized that Josh’s computer is still logged on and auto-generating messages, but Mattie finds out it’s already been sold to Dexter (Ian Somerhalder), a mechanic who in turn gets sucked into the proceedings after witnessing and sharing with Mattie a morbid video loop of lost souls on said unit. Soon, the wireless technologies to which Mattie and her friends are so tethered — cell phones, the Internet — all become perpetually open connections to a world beyond our own. Ghastly apparitions pop up, draining from those who encounter them their very will to live. This then somehow all morphs into a quasi-apocalyptic steeplechase, with Mattie and Dexter trying to make contact with a hermetic computer guru in order to prevent this hazy army of the evil dead from taking over the world.

Regardless of what you make of the recent influx of Americanized J-horror films, the fact is that they remain beholden to rhythms and mood, since the notion of a ghostly presence as chief cinematic menace — visions literally scaring people to death, and the like — has much deeper cultural roots in Japan and the far east. While such “low-fi,” emotionally rooted concepts can come off as a refreshing antidote to the orgiastic gore of genre films more entrenched in stalking — both psychological and literal — it requires an extraordinarily high degree of technical competence and atmospheric tightrope-walking, attributes Pulse does not have.

Sure, the movie does a few interesting things cinematographically, with director of photography Mark Plummer offering up a small sampler pack of different palettes; one eerie scene, purposefully evocative of hell, takes place in a room masked completely by red tape, while the silver frames of another panicked escape sequence seem almost like a mercury-dipped lithograph. But director Jim Sonzero’s framing and overall work with actors is dreadful enough to make the anonymity of Dark Water look positively artful by comparison. There’s no tonal consistency here, and Wes Craven’s screenplay adaptation is jaw-droppingly bad, full of paper-thin characterizations and even worse dialogue.

The chief problem is that Pulse is devoid of any unified and clearly delineated menace. As these ghosts flicker to and fro, we have no sense of their purpose or scale, only that a “portal” has been opened. Thus Pulse quickly devolves into a rather silly and feigned series of random jolts — one that’s moderately stylized in fits and starts, but still wholly emotionally hollow. (Weinstein Company, PG-13, 86 mins.)