Apartment 1303 (DVD)

Hey, kids! It's another J-horror movie about a dead child with mommy issues! And, just for fun, someone dies in a closet, a few people fall off a balcony — and there's even a young woman trying to solve the mystery with the help of a mature police detective!

Apartment 1303 is a Japanese horror movie like nothing you've ever seen… if you haven't ever seen a Japanese horror movie. Why on earth fallow fright flicks like this are allowed to be churned out like so much chum I'll never know, but the next time I see Takashi Shimizu I'm going to kick him in the shin.

It took three screenwriters (Kei Oishi, Ataru Oikawa and Takamasa Sato) to come up with the totally unoriginal tale of Apartment 1303, which is about — you guessed it — a haunted unit where a mother and child once lived, and both died. Ever since then, black hair has been growing unchecked and all inhabitants have been compelled to commit suicide.

In an opening scene that surely has Lee Strausberg spinning in his grave, a troupe of terrible teenage actors mug their way through a painful scene that finally winds up in a gory death, and then the story begins in earnest when we meet our heroine, the beautiful and brainy Mariko (Eriko Hatsune).

She gets drawn into the wicked web of Apartment 1303 after her younger sister rents it, and goes flying off the balcony just a few days later. Director Ataru Oikawa twiddles his thumbs throughout the rest of the paint-by-numbers plot as Mariko backtracks the occupant history of the addled abode and finds out a mother once killed her daughter there… or was it the other way around?

There are a few feeble attempts at plot twists and turns, but once you've seen this formula… you've seen it all.

Apartment 1303 will be released in the U.S. on October 23, 2007, via Tartan's Asia Extreme line. Asia Extreme has brought some great gems to a wider audience, but this is not one of them. You'll have more fun filling out an apartment rental agreement.

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