Apartment 143

Apartment 143 reminds me why there’s so much hate for found-footage-style horror movies and manages to make me beg for a less realistic movie for the first time in my life.

THE PLOT:

Get ready for a Grave Encounters flashback. In Apartment 143, a group of paranormal investigators that includes a slightly older and charismatic front man, a young white techy dude, a panicky female, and the token minority guy shack up with a single dad and his 2 kids to assess the nature of their paranormal activity. Single Dad’s overemotional tween daughter seems to be at the crux of the possessive (and sometimes sexual) attacks, while his wide-eyed son says things about his dead wife. The group uses cameras and other various devices until we are even more bored than we actually thought possible, and then there are some bad special effects thrown in for scares.

If only we could just….go outside! Wait…

THE GOOD:

There is one scene that is really, really, and I mean REALLY fucking good. It’s done in one take (uncut) and it’s a shot on Single Dad talking about the reality of living with his wife before she died. The acting is superb and just watching him speak is captivating. It’s too bad this scene is shoved between bad dialogue and cheesy jumps. I want to find just this monologue and post it – truly a great acting performance by Kai Lennox.

There’s some briefly good VFX that are hardly seen, but seem to look pretty good for the moment we see them in the moving camera when Emotional Tween is all possessed and stuff.

Aka, the best thing about your movie is some tossled hair and white contact lenses.

The only other thing besides that 15 second of footage that this movie has going for it is that the stationary wall cams are able to pivot, and the paranormal team is using actual paranormal gear (so it’s a bit different than what we normally see on, say, a ghost hunting show, and some of it is pretty cool). But…

THE BAD:

Like, the entire movie. I hate the people, I hate the premise. Even the technology I thought would be cool (normally strobe effects in movies make me antsy – great for horror, and almost classic at this point) was done in a manner so obnoxious, I thought my eyes would bleed.

I’ll save you the torture of sitting through 30 seconds of slow, anti-climactic strobing that reveals the only ghostie we see in the whole film. If you stare at this image for longer than a second, you have seen more ghost than you will see in Apartment 143. Just showing you this image is like, false advertising because you might think there is ghosts in this film. Silly you!

The plotline is compromised relentlessly for non-scary scares and the whole movie leaves you with more unanswered questions than it answers (in a bad way!). All in all Apartment 148 (a title I have to look up every time I say or type it – argh!) is nothing short of forgettable, slow, poorly done, and boring.

Plus, the advertising is terrible! “First real ghost story” – what does that even mean!? As in the others are fake, or this thing is old as ‘Murica? Why does your poster have a picture of a girl we don’t even see until the final frame of the film which BTW I’m pretty sure was nowhere else in the film?! (Yeah, it gets that bad). What the fuck is Emergo?

THE VERDICT:

Shaaaaame! Shame on you for further ruining the found-footy genre! I’m tempted to give this shitfest .5 but Kai Lennox’s knock out moment saves Apartment 148 from fractions by the mere margin of getting 1 motion sensor out of 5 for a whopping fail.