If not for the terrible opening and the rather plodding final, this summer’s remake of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s 2001 fright flick “Kairo” “Pulse” would actually be pretty darn good little thriller. Thanks to a fine performance by “Veronica Mars” star Kristen Bell and a smarter than usual screenplay by Wes Craven, this tightly wound cybernetic horror film is a scarily grand time at the Cineplex.

Oh but does it ever fall apart during that final. The idiotic prologue of a scared computer hacker named Josh (Jonathan Tucker) running around a college library is silly enough, but then throw in an imbecilic apocalyptic John Carpenter-like climax that makes absolutely no sense and treats its audience with contempt and you’ve got a real problem. It’s an awful way for it all to crumble down into nothingness, and had director Jim Sonzero managed to hold it together for just a teensy bit longer I’d have been more than willing to give “Pulse” a pass.

The plot, for all its appearances to the contrary, is really quite simple. A door to the world of the dead has been opened through society’s continually increasing usage of wireless and electronic devices. Cell phones, laptops, wi-fi connections, personal computers; all of it is a conduit for ghosts to worm their way back into the world of the living. Psychology student Mattie (Bell) discovers this, and with the help of her friends Isabell (Christina Milian), Stone (Rick Gonzalez) and Tim (Samm Levine), and the assistance of a mysterious hacker named Dexter (Ian Somerhalder), it is up to her to make things right.

Much of this borders on the excellent. Making far more sense than Kurosawa’s (rather overrated, easily not one of his best) original, Sonzero and Craven manage some epically eerie moments throughout, some of the characters’ early encounters with the ghosts as good as any you’re ever likely to see. In many ways, this atmospheric chiller recalls both Robert Wise’s masterpiece “The Haunting” and Carpenter’s “In the Mouth of Madness,” only instead of a haunted house it’s the world being spooked and in place of monsters it’s the dead stealing our souls in order to accelerate Armageddon.

How refreshing it is to see a horror film willing to build scares intelligently, crafting momentum minute by minute instead of throwing everything in a blender and hoping the resulting cocktail is appetizing. Mark Plummer’s (“Head Over Heels”) cinematography is excellent, while Elia Cmiral’s (“Ronin”) driving score adds just the right touch of menace throughout. And while the bluish-gray sepia tones it’s all shot in get a bit old after a while, they do give things a computer generated cyber-reality creating a sense of suicidal malaise fitting things perfectly.

Too bad it falls apart. The grand solution to all of this is straight out of “Independence Day,” the characters suddenly acting like moronic cliché teenage horror movie idiots than the intuitive young adults they’d been for the majority of the film’s running time. More so, while I applaud Craven and Sonzero’s willingness to follow Kurosawa’s original plot to its devilishly disturbing conclusion, they can’t seem to make that last slash across the jugular relegating things to an unsatisfying coda that unfortunately screams for an even more banal sequel.

So what’s the final verdict? Well, “Pulse” is certainly better than the lack of studio faith (it’s jumped around the release schedule for almost a year, the Weinstein Company declining to screen it for critics at the very last minute) would indicate, but not near enough to warrant paying ten bucks to actually go and see it. But for a late night tell-me-a-scary-story-so-we-can-cuddle-close-together rental it’s not all that bad, and while that’s not exactly a glowing recommendation it’s probably a heck of a lot better than anyone, me included, probably anticipated.