The Hollywood remake of APARTMENT 1303 (2007), a Japanese horror film making the lists of favorite J-horror cinema, but for the life of me, I can't understand why some Japanese directors are stuck into cloning/replicating the hugely successful RINGU (1998, directed by Hideo Nakata). The 2007 Japanese film was penned by three people, Kei Ôishi , Ataru Oikawa and Takamasa Sato, and was directed by Oikawa -- with the by-now familiar tale of a haunted house, a mother and daughter's complex and murderous relationship, and a vengeful ghost wreaking havoc with the new tenants' lives.
Michael Taverna directs the Hollywood remake (produced by Monte Cristo International Entertainment, which was also behind the original), with a limited story arc and almost cardboard characters to work on.
(SPOILERS) Creepy atmosphere is established, and the audience (Westerns just love Asian horror films!) feels the mounting terror (that it has come to expect after an explosion of J-horror products like RINGU, THE GRUDGE, DARK WATER, ONE MISSED CALL), but the actual apparitions are scarce, as opposed to a lot of 'exposition' and conversational folderol, and the stubborn, sometimes stupid behavior of the three lead actresses are as mind-boggling as the existence of a matricidal ghost.
Julienne Michelle is Janet Slate, a rebellious teenager who moves out of her mother (and sister)'s house and rents an apartment that immediately gives her the creeps (why do heroines of ghost movies insist on staying in a house, even after strange and frightful encounters?). Janet is the latest victim to fall prey to a 'curse' that claims the lives of female tenants. Michelle and Mischa Barton (as elder sister Lana, a role that seemingly channels the Vera Miles role in Hitchcock's 1960 masterpiece, PSYCHO) make do with the thinly-written characters, but Rebecca De Mornay (my favorite actress since 1991), as their seemingly spaced-out rocker (!) mother, steals every scene she's in. De Mornay's rocker attire reminds me of her turn as a singer in THE SLUGGER'S WIFE (1985), and I think those are her real vocals on APARTMENT 1303's soundtrack. Her performance as a self-absorbed, often drunk mother who would rather play the guitar and sing, is bulls-eye.
Corey Sevier (playing Mark) is a sensitive and handsome leading man; the 29-year-old Canadian had a shot at stardom as "Apollo" in 2011's IMMORTALS and a lead role in AWAKEN (2012) but has been acting since 1993. This guy will go places.
Writer-director Taverna and Kei Ôishi, as screenwriters, take the Japanese script almost at face value (merely changing the characters' names) and hardly improves on it, but what seminally worked for Japanese (and Asian) audiences is hard to replicate with Hollywood remakes (wit, THE RING with Oscar nominee Naomi Watts), and once again, we come up with a clone of a genuinely scary yet unoriginal Japanese cinematic work.
De rigeur characters are typically written in: a strange and perverted landlord, a sinister young-girl neighbor who speaks cryptically about dead tenants, the boyfriend who may or may not believe (in this case, Sevier is actually an undercover cop, and has a sizzling love scene with Michelle before the poor girl gets bumped off), and the detective cop (John Diehl) bugging the surviving sister.
But who am I to argue? I find myself watching both original Japanese-horror films and the Hollywood versions. By far, THE GRUDGE (2004), with Sarah Michelle Gellar, is better that the rest.
