Apartment 143 Review

• 9th Oct 2012

Just what the world needs: another found footage horror film full of all the usual clichés. Sigh.

Apartment 143 starts out with promise and hints of originality. Unfortunately it soon slips into relying on the usual scare tactics: bang doors, creaking, ringing phones. You know the drill.

Three parapsychologists are invited to study the apartment of Alan, a single father with a young boy and an angsty teenage daughter. Alan claims that since his wife passed away the family have been followed by a series of haunting.  Dr Helzer and his team arrive with scientific gadgets to prove that the seemingly paranormal activity that the troubled family is experiencing can be explained away by science. Queue strobe lighting, spooky images, chairs flying across rooms and the usual tricks that are recycled for the umpteenth time in this film.

Comparing this to Paranormal Activity would be unfair as Paranormal Activity is a superior film. And it’s set in a house, not an apartment. But in all seriousness Apartment 143 is very much following in the footsteps of Paranormal Activity and it seems studios are happy to churn out plenty of these low-budget films in the hope of recreating the success of Paranormal Activity. If Apartment 143 feels like one more cynical attempt to cash-in then that’s because it is. Very little in the film is original other than one of its leading character’s stubborn refusal to accept any paranormal activity is taking place in the apartment, and this soon becomes ridiculous. I understand Dr Helzer is a man of science, but after the umpteenth supernatural scare you’d think he might start to consider the possibility that he is witnessing a genuine haunting. His refusal to acknowledge any alternative theories becomes rather annoying and then downright ridiculous.

Although it is the parapsychologists that bring a smidgen of originality to this film, it does feel like you’re watching CSI: Ghosts and the amount of exposition is laughable. Sure, the audience needs to understand what the parapsychologists are doing, but the explanations become dull and the scares too infrequent.

As a horror fan this reviewer is rather sick of found footage films, they’ve been overdone and most of them are very poor. Apartment 143 feels very run-of-the-mill and lazy, and that’s the main issue with the film: you’ve seen it all before and you’ve probably seen it done better. In order for a horror to be really effective you want the audience to be rooting for the main characters, unfortunately the characters are not endearing and it’s hard to care about them. All in all this is a dull film which did little to hold this reviewers attention. There’s a handful of good scares in here but nothing of note. Essentially this is a lazy rip-off of a far superior film and I would have expected better from Rodrigo Cortés, the man who brought us the highly original Buried. Disappointing

Lindsay Emerson