Movie Appraisal: Apartment 1303 (2007)

Apartment 1303 is yet another Japanese ghost tale set in some sort of apartment. It revolves around a restless spirit doing far too much damage for something incorporeal and unreal. And by my quickened tone and brisk pacing of the words you are reading at this very moment, you may be able to tell that I'm a little sick of the Japanese ghost story genre. They do this same kind of story far too often to be scary, thrilling, or fun anymore. When the only Japanese horror movie I had ever seen was The Ring and the original Ringu, I was perfectly fine. The movies both worked quite well, but now after watching countless Japanese horror movies, I find myself sick of young girls haunting and being murderous to other young girls. I know it's part of the mythology of Japan, part of the culture, but it makes for very uninteresting movies at times.

I mean, yes, some of the movies shake it up. The Ring movies pioneered the genre and were really special because of that. A few of the movies of this type I've been more positive on (like The Haunted Apartments) are good because they do change things up, maybe changing the tone or having some kind of twist or something... but I'm finding myself getting bored by these movies, being able to tell everything that will happen from beginning to end, yawning endlessly because I want to see something creative, something different... something meaningful. Is that so much to ask? I guess it must be.

Oh boy. This movie tells the story of a haunted apartment. If you could here my voice right now reading these sentences to you, it would be as if I were falling asleep and dying a little bit with every passing word. Keep that in mind. The apartment is haunted and young women just keep dying. Every time one of them dies, it's incredibly obvious that that particular girl is going to die. They just jump for some reason off of the thirteenth floor and nobody ever really tries to stop them or anything. Nope. These girls are too wily and too fast. No man can even hope to restrain a small Japanese girl. I'm sorry if I'm being a little offensive here, but there has to be some element of reality here. A ghost isn't just going to make a chick commit suicide (kind of?) right in front of her friends or significant other. A ghost will drive the girl mad over time, having her jump while she's both alone and vulnerable. Having it happen in full view of other people makes the suicide less shocking and sillier than it has any right to be.

There are some shocking moments in the film, and yes, it can be somewhat creepy when it isn't obvious and predictable, but it has trouble staying consistent. The plot is so easy to predict that it's absolutely laughable. I could predict jump scares and crazy scenes, moments of blood, or whatever else... and it really took away from any immersion I could have had in this movie. All I wanted to do was curl up and fall asleep because the movie was so much less interesting than anything else.

...fine... I'm being a little harsh here, but I'm going through a lot with these movies, okay? This movie in particular put me through hell by reminding me of 1408, one of my favorite horror stories and horror movies, but being terrible in basically every way that 1408 is good. Hell, even the wall crumbling bits at the end were worse in this film. And the death/suicide scenes were so much less shocking and so much schlockier. That's a word now by the way. A comparative of schlocky, which is the adjective form of schlock. Oh boy, when will this movie get out of my brain?

The ending was awful, making the entire movie pointless. It was needlessly confusing at points. The acting was inconsistent, with some actors doing okay and others going over-the-top. The ghosts are never scary despite the fact that they are MURDEROUS GHOSTS, POSSESSING GIRLS AND MAKING THEM PLUMMET TO THEIR DEATHS. Those kind of entities should be the MOST terrifying rather than silly and hard to take seriously.

The direction of the film, by Ataru Oikawa, is pretty decent though despite my complaints. The deaths scenes are pretty horrid, but the movie has very good lighting for its genre, and if there were no noises in the film, no voices, no awkward sounds, etc. I could see the film being quite effective for the little tension it does have. Some of the gorier effects are also well done, especially of note is the chewed-on bloody bottle that becomes a minor plot point. I found myself kind of shying away from that image, finding it fairly well done.

The story though is... well, not good. It involves an abusive mother and her daughter. The daughter eventually kills the mother, then as she's about to lose everything, she kills herself. The mother's body, for some reason, isn't found until after the girl's suicide. You'd think it would smell or something... Then a series of girls move into the apartment. The ones that have the apartment as their first place of living once they leave home soon find themselves dead, killed by the jealous girl who could never get out from under her mother's thumb, in life or in death. The main character of the movie, Mariko, eventually is introduced as the sister of one of the false protagonists in the beginning of the film, Sayaka. Sayaka has killed herself by jumping from the balcony of the apartment while her friends and boyfriend look on with horror on their faces. Mariko investigates, eventually finding out the truth with the help of a friendly (and kind of creepy in a weird pervert way) detective. (Maybe it's just me. He gave me a weird vibe in the movie.) Mariko finds some common ground with the ghost girl in that they have similar relationships with their mothers, but all of that is for nothing. All of Mariko's character development, all of the searching for the plot... yeah, that's all meaningless the second Mariko is killed by the ghost and all of her knowledge dies with her.

I don't even want to talk about this movie anymore. It's not a bad movie necessarily, and some might even really enjoy it. It does have quality to it despite my complaints, but I almost dislike this movie viscerally, finding most of it unimaginative and utterly devoid of any emotions from any of the characters. It's the same as so many other Japanese ghost horror movies, and I'm sick to death of watching these kinds of movies. I don't suspect I'll be watching too many more unless there are some that really switch up the formulaic approach that most of these movies take. I can't and won't recommend this movie. Go watch 1408 for a better movie with a similar plot. Go watch The Haunted Apartments if you want an utterly better Japanese ghost story that has to do with apartments... if that's your thing. I mean, it's an oddly specific genre to like, but I won't judge. I love space horror movies that take place in space, on a spaceship, and psychological horror that involves little to no psychology. I'm not one to judge.

Manga Judgment: Black Paradox (ブラックパラドクス) by Junji Ito (伊藤 潤二) (2009)

Well, I never thought that the day would come when I would not only be reading a manga, but would be actively reviewing it on my blog here. I've read a few of Junji Ito's works recently, and I have to say that I like most of them even if I don't love most of them. A little while ago I reviewed the movie version of Uzumaki and found it a little ridiculous, but I really liked the manga version. I especially liked the ending which reminded me of House of Leaves, which remains my favorite novel.

Anyway, Black Paradox is no Uzumaki. I don't know exactly how to proceed with reviewing this. It's a new type of review I'm trying out here and hopefully this works. I'm also finding this strangely ironic because this weekend I'm off to an anime convention with my girlfriend (She's into this stuff a great deal more than I ever could or would be, and I'll be joining her for that kind of insanity...), so I guess this is as fitting a time as any to do a review of a manga.

See, I had personal reasons for disliking manga and anime for the longest time. I had seen people literally consumed by these ways of storytelling. Certain types of anime and manga tend to breed fanboys and fangirls who eat, breathe, and live these stories. I found it out the hard way more than once. Socially awkward anime fans... an ex-girlfriend who paid more attention to her Japanese animes and manga than she ever would to me... and some of the weirdest fetishes I have ever heard of outside of the internet. I still don't understand Yuri and Yaoi, and I really don't want to understand them. Blast it, last year I was at the same convention I'm going to this year and in a panel I was sitting in on, hardcore Yaoi conversations started up with young children in the same room! Kingdom Hearts fans are a little hard to understand at times... and teenagers and adults should know better than to be sick enough to speak about cartoon relationships and sex around young children who enjoy essentially a children's video game series.

I throw all of these things out there because, as I've mentioned before on this blog, I have a bias against anime and manga. So when I say I like something in those media, like Uzumaki or Miyazaki and his films, it really does mean something special. Trust me on that one.

So, my girlfriend, bless her crazy head, introduced me to Junji Ito not long ago. She mentioned it in an offhand type of way, something about a horror manga I might enjoy if I gave these things a chance. She set me off to reading it, but I doubt she ever really expected that I would with my bias against the entire medium. She was shocked, literally shocked, when I told her that not only had I read some manga, but that I had enjoyed it. It's new for her, seeing me actually enjoy something that she's been into long before I met her and not complaining about it, not hating on it, but actually reading it, even recommending certain stories to her! She finds it funny, but I don't like having the bias against this medium. I've had some bad experiences about manga and anime and popular and fetishistic Japanese things, so I never thought I'd ever enjoy an anime or manga thing... but I was wrong.

I really like Junji Ito's style and his storytelling. He isn't the best writer in the world, nor is his stuff incredibly horrific like some reviewers tend to think, but he tells a pretty decent story with a good pace in the vein of Lovecraft, the short stories of Stephen King, and early cosmic horror in general. He has some odd tastes, and his characters tend to all have similar looks to them in different stories, but he does a good job at drawing and writing compelling stories. I like the manga he does for the most part. Because I do like a lot of his stuff, allow me to say that I'll probably be doing more reviews of his manga and the movies based off of said manga in the future.

So, let's get started! Black Paradox is not very good.

It's starts off pretty well, with an interesting premise of four people going to commit suicide together for similar reasons, but the story simply falls apart when it gets more complex. The characters barely exist as characters. They are so one-dimensional and shallow. There is no real weight to the story either as many of the characters in it either don't accentuate the seriousness of what's going on or are simply too callous to care. There never seems to be a main character despite one of the characters, Marisol, seeming to take that role in the beginning. Only one character ever seems to even grow throughout the story: Baracchi, and that's only because of some plastic surgery and a convoluted  love triangle type of thing that never gets any closure anyway.

There is a mad doctor who is so villainous it's almost comical. He seems to want both of the women in the story without any problem at all. He, conveniently, is the main hinge of the plot, and his villainous behavior and extreme understanding of science and medicine are the only reasons this plot ever even gets off of the ground. I just want to sigh at the convenient story and ridiculously one-sided characters. I will say to Junji Ito's credit that his drawings are mostly superb, and his art shows a dramatic improvement from some of his earlier works even if there is not as much grotesque art, the characters and the backgrounds are much better done in general.

I found the story and plot a little too preposterous to set aside my suspension of disbelief, and constantly found myself wondering why things were happening, why was it these four people? What was going on? and sometimes when those question come into my head, it can be a good thing, but here it felt like a distinctly negative aspect of the manga. I didn't really enjoy reading the story after the second chapter or so, but pushed through because that's how I roll. Again, the art is pretty good, but the story is literally almost laughable and the characters are basically one-dimensional or nonentities.

I did like how Baracchi has a "birthmark" that takes up half of her face. I liked the art there and would have loved to have had her backstory explored. The same goes for all of the characters. I found their backstories so much more interesting than the story presented. Four people going to commit suicide together and are stopped by some weird forces? That sounds amazing to me. But the finished product with body parts opening up to another dimension where souls are stored in jewels of a sort?  I don't know. It just didn't do it for me.

The premise is really that weird. These four people can eventually, once their body parts are removed from them, enter into a comically enlarged removed body organ (that's conveniently stored in a tank or a pool) into another dimension to find soul stones that are used for various things like energy expenditure and such. Oh boy... Sure, there's a message in there about people being willing to exploit anything that makes their lives easier, even if it's their own souls... but... hmm... the message I just wrote there actually makes me like the story a little bit more. If the manga was written solely for that message it's still a bad manga, but at least it's trying to say something.

Honestly the idea of the story sounds a hell of a lot better than the execution. Reading through it was almost excruciating, especially when Junji Ito's visuals weren't as strange and amazing as they usually are. No, I;m not contradicting my earlier statements either. His people looked better as did the NORMAL and MUNDANE backgrounds, but his horror elements and creepy art were woefully missing from this piece. I found nothing incredibly memorable, and largely this manga is forgettable and not as good as most of the Junji Ito stuff that I've looked through over the last couple of weeks. I could compare Black Paradox fairly unfavorably to Hellstar Remina (地獄星レミナ), which I thought had some similar elements but was better executed in every single way.

I can't recommend Black Paradox as much as I've enjoyed Junji Ito's works. Go check out Gyo, Uzumaki, or Hellstar Remina long before you waste your time with this one. I didn't enjoy it. I didn't have a good time reading it. I don't think it's really worth reading. I don't think it's the kind of quality I've come to expect from Junji Ito.

Anyway, I may do some more of these Manga Judgments, but expect harsh criticisms at times if I do. This is a style I do not generally like, so it takes something really special to blow me away. I don't want to show my bias, if I can help it, but when something is bad expect me to really scorch the boots off of it. That being said, if I get the inkling to review Hellstar Remina, you'll see me actively loving everything in that one... so much more than Black Paradox. (I said that last in a very derisive tone as I wrote it. Just thought you readers should know.)