By Keri O’Shea
As a general rule of thumb, I tend to avoid English language versions of J-horrors. Sure, the Far East has provided rich pickings for cautious filmmakers and those who fund them, but almost as soon as Ring happened, Japanese horror became a victim of its own success; no sooner had Sadako become the impromptu ambassador for a subsequent army of creepy kids with flowing locks, but the ubiquity of it all had begun to show, and by the time Hollywood got its greasy mitts on J-horror, horror fans already knew the ropes. It only made colossal cock-ups like Gore Verbinski’s remake feel all the more pointless and jarring. Still, Ring was – is – an excellent horror movie. The Grudge is a ripping yarn too, and in each case the remakes failed to capture the creepiness of the originals. So, then, why would you elect to remake a movie which is at best part of the horde of imitators spawned by the success of those two? This is a question I soon asked myself upon sitting down to watch Apartment 1303, an American spin on the lacklustre 2007 Japanese film of same title and – by and large – plot.
The plot runs thusly, anyway: Janet Slate (Julianne Michelle) has had quite enough of living with her domineering, difficult and frequently drunk mother (Rebecca de Mornay) and her sister Lara (Mischa Barton) for that matter, so when she goes to view an apartment, she likes it so much that she immediately signs a year-long lease. Uh-oh. Immediately, things aren’t right with this place. For starters, there’s a creepy little girl in the foyer (which would surely entitle you to some sort of rebate), the Super is a perv who offers her money off her rent if she will only pay him in kind, and of course there’s a long-haired ghostie in the apartment, though bucking the usual trend by having long fair hair. Things are so bad, that she even thinks about going home to Mom – but this isn’t to be after all, so she heads back to the apartment for a second night with boyfriend Mark (Corey Sevier) for a rather coy, underwear-on sex scene, just prior to being hurled out of the window by said ghostie. Boobs or GTFO, I guess…
Right. So it’s down to Lara to find out what really happened to Janet; she picks up on the subtle clues that this wasn’t an honest-to-goodness suicide by the fact that her dead sister calls her up and invites her over, so over she goes and, with Mark’s assistance, she begins to investigate the circumstances surrounding Room 1303.
Wow, this is messy. The jigsaw puzzle of actors and plot developments just…doesn’t fit together. Whilst some scenes are compelling and nicely-shot, they all seem sandwiched between poorly-acted scenes or plot lines which aren’t fully realised. People’s emotions don’t fit with what they’re experiencing. Motivations are hinted at but not expounded; perhaps director and (re-)writer Michael Taverna assumes we all know how J-horrors play out and why ghosts do what they do, so there’s little point in delineating anything. There is, though. You still have to try. I wasn’t clear on where an entire character went during this film, and after all when someone reads out all the exposition at the fifty-minute mark, it does tend to make the next thirty minutes or so which follow completely redundant. Julianne Michelle takes events rather oddly in her stride until it’s possibly decided that she’s a little too calm, so she then becomes instantly shrill and gets her make-up is smeared all over her face, as nothing declares mental turmoil in a lady like runny mascara. Mischa Barton, one of the big names attached to this project, fares rather better in her low-key, decidedly non-glam role as Lara, but then there isn’t a great deal for her to play around with. There are hints of some grand mental instability in her background, and she acts it out at certain points with not a little flair, but again, not much is made of it. It’s just a neat way of justifying a few things later in the script. As for Rebecca de Mornay, she is oddly compelling in the short time she spends on screen, but the OTT nature of her character edges her way into comedy value on more than one occasion.
Oh, sure, this is an attractive-looking film. I’ll say that for it. In contrast to many of the blue-filtered, washed-out colour palates trendy in horror cinema these days, Apartment 1303 is a vivid, even garishly-coloured movie, with the haunted space of the apartment perhaps the most colourful of all. Many shots have evidently been put together in a considered way (cinematographer Paul M. Sommers deserves a tip of the hat) and the plentiful city vistas used here are very nicely done indeed. It’s a shame, then, that this is a film and not a painting; when not trying to maintain motivation to see this through to the end, this looked great.
Ultimately, though, Apartment 1303 is proof positive that the well, Sadako’s or otherwise, is drying up. It’s also evidence that it’s not enough to ransack Japanese cinema for ghost stories; often, Oriental ghost stories translate badly to Western settings anyway, as we lack the tradition of, say, yūrei – vengeful ghosts being kept from the afterlife – chuck one into Detroit, and it might not make much sense. (Even hanging onto the Oriental-style screens for use in the apartment was pushing it a bit, as these aren’t commonplace in the West, but I guess they are just so handy for the creepy silhouette scenes.) Apartment 1303 is visually accomplished, effective here and there, but ultimately familiarly, fatally flawed. Might be time to leave Japan alone and write some original screenplays then, eh?
Apartment 1303 will be released by Koch Media on 3rd June 2013