Apartment 143

This is another movie Netflix has been bothering me to watch. It looked like someone threw the poster from The Last Exorcism into a blender with posters for Chain Letter and a few Asian horror movies and I wasn't sure if I'd like it. I finally checked it out today, and it's a mixed bag. The characters are likable I guess, with the exception of the lead parapsychologist who is an arrogant know-it-all who of course knows nothing. The story is that a mother dies in a car crash and the family she left behind is being haunted by her ghost. her four year old son (who is adorable) insists that he still talks to mommy, her teenage daughter is insolent and rude and blames her father for her mother's death, and the father is apparently hiding a secret about how the mother died.

The movie could have been a lot better than it was. The parapsychologists do a whole lot of assuming for scientists who keep saying they investigate everything in order to find the truth. They blame the father almost from the beginning, and the scene where they browbeat him on camera to get him to tell them what really happened pissed me off so much it made me want to stab them all (plus they were WRONG, but you never hear them admit that, instead they go off half cocked with another dumb theory that doesn't even fit the facts they observed themselves, and they still seem to believe at the end of the movie that this is what happened, even if it really makes no sense.

The ghost effects are nothing we haven't seen before but they're not bad, mostly pictures falling and doors closing and the like. I've seen better, but I still wanted this movie to do something, have some big surprise reveal or whatever, but even when it tries to do that, it kind of falls flat. This isn't necessarily a bad way to kill an hour and a half, but you could still do a lot better with better films.