APARTMENT 1303

(A.k.a. APARTMENT 1303 3D)

Janet (Julianne Michelle) is so fed up with living with her drunken mother, former rock star Maddie (Rebecca De Mornay), that she signs a one-year lease on an apartment in the city without even viewing it.

Despite the reservations of her older sister Lara (Mischa Barton), who still lives under sufferance with Maddie, Janet goes ahead and moves into the apartment. This is ignoring the graffiti in the building's rickety elevator, the creepy caretaker who knocks on her door asking to see her tits, and spooky young neighbour Emily (Madison McAleer) who warns Janet to leave before she goes the same way as her apartment's last tenant - a girl who leapt to her death from its high-rise balcony.

Janet has all of these things to contend with during her first night's stay in apartment 1303, along with strange noises in the walls, a smell of rotting flesh and ghostly silhouettes appearing behind doors. Incredibly, rather than fleeing, she opens a bottle of wine, has a little sob and then rings her new boyfriend Mark (Corey Sevier) for comfort.

Surviving the night, Janet rings home later the next day and says she's wants to come back. Lara dissuades her, arguing that their mother is in such a state that the fallout would be worse than anything the apartment can offer. Wrong. Janet falls from the balcony later that night.

Mark, who'd been in the apartment earlier that evening for a spot of nookie, was the last person to see her alive. So, initially, Lara suspects him of wrong-doing. But then she inspects the apartment for herself and feels the same fears her sister did. When a detective (John Diehl) clues her in on the apartment's history - five women having apparently committed suicide in there, all in the same manner - she resolves to explore further ... with Mark's assistance.

And so, the pair move in to the apartment, determined to discover the truth behind its deadly history. But at what cost?

15 years ago, there was a lot of love for J-Horror. It reinvigorated the fright genre, films such as RINGU and AUDITION offering something genuinely fresh for the jaded horror hound. But then, the Asian market became saturated with one rip-off after another. By the time Ataru Oikawa's original APARTMENT 1303 was released in 2007, it really was a case of "we've seen it all countless times before". In my review of that film for this site, I wrote that it "takes every cliché of the J-Horror cycle and churns them out repeatedly" and that it "limps through a tired Asian ghost story formula before finally reaching its unreservedly non-shocking climax".

This unnecessary remake follows suit.

Despite minor changes here and there, director Michael Taverna - who also adapted Kei Oshi's original screenplay - stays very true to the source material. Even the pace, tone and hackneyed scare set-ups remain unchanged. One addition is De Mornay as the drunken folk singer. Most reviews are complimentary about her performance. Don't get me wrong, I'm a fan of hers, but she's utterly laughable here - overwrought and theatrically drunk in a true soap opera style. Still, if that's her singing, her voice is pretty decent.

Barton meanwhile sounds like she's being slowed down by drugs. She has no charisma whatsoever and therefore can't hope to elicit one iota of empathy from the viewer. Likewise the unsympathetic piece of wood that is Sevier. Michelle's the finest actor here, and - aside from odd nightmarish on-screen flashes of her visage later - she's dead within the first third.

Attractively shot and slickly edited, this certainly has the technical proficiency of your average Hollywood remake. But it's all artifice: there's nothing going on beneath the thin veneer of style. The usual J-Horror tropes roll out with depressing predictability - and, what's worse, they're not even scary.

This type of watered-down, by-the-numbers swill is best recommended to TWILIGHT fans who've never seen a horror film. Personally, I'd rather shart at a friend's wedding than sit through this again.

Koch Media's blu-ray disc is a region-free dual layer affair, proffering both 2D and 3D versions of the uncut film.

While the 3D version looks wholly adequate, it must be said that the film doesn't really take full advantage of the medium in terms of things popping off the screen. While the depth of modern 3D is there to be seen, fans are unlikely to be wowed by what they see. Arguably its most impressive moment is during Janet's green-screen plummet to her death (roughly 1 second of footage).

Focusing on the 2D version of the film, colours are deliberately muted in a stylised manner. The transfer stays true to this look, rendering most interior scenes as slightly dark and murky. Still, detail is fine throughout and skin-tones are free from any unwelcome waxiness. A nice filmic texture is retained for the duration of playback, while blacks and contrast are consistently solid. It's not a knock-out transfer, but it's decent enough.

Both 2D and 3D renditions of the movie are presented in 2.35:1, with 16x9 enhancement (a given on blu-ray) and served as decently sized MPEG4-AVC files.

English audio is provided in 2.0 PCM Stereo and 5.1 DTS-HD mixes. Both are satisfyingly robust, with the latter having the edge, come the film's set-piece moments.

An animated main menu page contains pop-up menus which include a scene-selection option allowing access to the film via 12 chapters.

There are no bonus features on the disc, unless you count the two trailers which play upon disc load-up. These are for the Richard Gere starrer ARBITRAGE and the atrocious-looking RED DAWN rehash.

APARTMENT 1303 is pretty rubbish, as was the film it's a remake of. A HD transfer and the prospect of getting to view it in 3D can't disguise this fact.

Also available on DVD.

Review by Stuart Willis