Apartment 1303 (2012)★★☆☆☆

Wow, this movie was bad. Laughably bad, but not so bad it’s funny or so bad it’s good – it’s really bad. I was lured by the promise of Mischa Barton and Rebecca De Mornay in it, and they were in it all right – but it was still bad.

The dialogue is awful (well, in particular the monologues are awful – everyone talks to themselves, out loud, way too much in this movie) and everyone is just acting so damn hard with such terrible terrible writing.

You will hear the line “Apartments don’t kill people. People kill people.” no less than three times if you make it through this film. Oh, and if you make it through this film, don’t expect any sort of satisfaction. There’s no payoff. There’s not even much built up tension in this by the end and I still felt frustratingly unsatisfied by the ending.

It’s watchable in the sense that I watched the entire thing and didn’t feel the need to turn it off completely, but that’s about it. It’s not scary, it asks a bunch of questions it doesn’t answer, and I may have mentioned this already but the dialogue is so bad.

I just learned it’s a remake of a Japanese film of the same name. This was so bad I’m tempted to watch the original film, subtitles and all, to see if it really is just a poorly translated, weirdly acted American remake problem and not a problem with the story itself.