Emergo aka Apartment 143 (2011)
Okay my children I have a very big announcement to make. I have been wasting my talents here. No, I do not think I'm special or particularly gifted, it's just that it's so damn easy to churn out a piece of crap, especially if it's a hand-held found-footage piece designed to bore you for an hour and 25 minutes then provide 5 minutes of 'What was that?' moments. I figure I'm missing out on the big bucks little idiots are shelling out to watch this stuff (even more if it's made in 3D). I figure all I need is a sheet of paper with, say, 10 or 12 bullet points on it, with room to write the basic garbage, change a name here or there, put in a really nasty CGI or two, splash some blood around and tada! I'm not kidding, I could do it. I did it for this movie. I shit you not kids, I wrote most of my review before seeing the movie, only having to change a few minor things, but the plot, progression and ending I got exactly right. And I am NOT psychic. Or exceptionally smart. I'm just a movie reviewer who has realized that it isn't originality and imagination that makes movies, it's just plain good ole' marketing - put together what the kiddies want to see and collect my check. Easy.
The Last Exorcist, Paranormal Activity 1 through 1000, Grave Encounters, Episode 50 - I hate to tell you people but if you've paid to see more than one of these you have been seriously ripped off. Because each is a carbon of the other, with a few details changed here and there and a whole lot of nothing to pad it with. This is nothing different. In fact it definitely feels a lot more cheaply made. A parapsychologist and his two cronies are hired by this guy to find out why his life is crap. That's basically all of them, right? Whether apartment, insane asylum, graveyard, house, it's all about people with crappy lives trying to find something else to blame it on. The man's wife died in a car accident, his teenage daughter hates him, and his young son is growing distant. Hmm, sounds perfectly normal to me. 
Oh, but after the wife died, strange things happened at their house... spooooky things (get out the Scooby snacks, we're gonna need 'em). They move to a crappy apartment and damn it all, the spooooky things follow them - and they're getting worse. So out comes the tons of equipment that has no clear purpose except to the 'experts', the endless scenes of cameras and other crap being put up all over the apartment (the landlord's gonna love all the new holes in the walls), and boring interviews of the family as they get a background of the place. YAWN. This was even worse than usual, because the 'found footage' is often grainy, out of focus, or just plain ole' rotten quality (I found myself several times wiping at my screen thinking it was my stuff - nope, the film sucked.).
So as with every story it starts with a door opening, a breeze from nowhere, moving dishes, you know, elementary boogeyman stuff. It upgrades to the thumping and noises in the walls and ceiling. Oh yeah, and the split second view of some female figure. YAWN. Sorry about that. It's just my review was almost completely written by this time and the movie wasn't even 1/3 done. There are so many - I don't know if you'd call them continuity errors or just plain laziness - incompleted conversations, scenes that seemed thrown in for no reason, someone would start to explain something then... nothing. I vote for lazy. Since the filmmaker already has taken your money, he doesn't have to escalate things in decent time, so prepare for a lot of waiting (hmm, sounds an awful lot like PA). 
FINALLY things start to move - and by move I mean destroy themselves - they're not satisfied with throwing a chair across the room, ALL the furniture is tossed about like kindling, people are thrown like rag dolls, and the teenage daughter (played by a 21 y/o actress who looked every year of it) who's been an uber bitch through the whole thing now goes into the 'I'm possessed' routine, complete with white eyes, saying there's 'many' with her (isn't there always) and hints at some family secrets.
Oh this family wasn't so normal after all. In fact, the nice, loving mommy was also an uber bitch, just that she was old enough to drink, whore around, not take her meds, and be 'wicked' by 'lying in her bed for days without bathing'. Umm, I think that's called mentally ill folks. I had it called a good 20 minutes before the supposed 'expert' tells the man his wife was probably schizo and now so is his daughter - her angst and teenage hormones expressing themselves in 'psychic rage'. That's right - teenage girls are wicked, wicked creatures capable of massive damage. Sheesh. So anyway the mom died by crashing her car looking for her family who'd fled from her 'wickedness' and the teenager hates daddy for that. YAWN. After an obligatory 'look the girl can float' scene, the smug 'professional' concludes that with treatment she will be okay and the family can relax. This guy was a real piece of work, he spouted so much garbage that he then turned around and contradicted himself on, you really tuned him out quick. One sentence he assures the father his apartment is not haunted because 'there is nothing supernatural because nature can't transcend itself'. Okay. But the next sentence he talks of ghosts, poltergeists, spiritual energies that stick around... in other words, nature transcending itself, right? DUH.
So, self-satisfied and smug with a job well done, we see the now completely trashed apartment, and the equipment all too slowly being taken down and shipped out. Oh, to be clever, one piece of equipment the filmmaker chose to have pixelated out as if it were some big secret. The secret? IT DOESN'T EXIST. But the expert tells the cameraman to leave one camera on for the police to be able to look at all the footage later (thus the 'found footage' angle because everybody leaves so...) and now I've written the end of my review, knowing exactly what's going to happen. I have to wait... and wait... and wait... and then BOOM! or rather for me, boom, a female figure appears on the ceiling and scurries toward the camera which then goes out. Fin.Emergo? Oh, that was the original title that didn't sell. It means 'to emerge'. Now don't you feel smart?
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