Apartment 143 gives us a look at a supposedly haunted apartment. The difference here is that the scientific investigators are looking for scientific explanations rather than the supernatural. It's a neat idea, but leads to some heavy exposition scenes that betray the found-footage set-up. Perhaps if these had been explained in talking head interviews it wouldn't seem so clunky and forced. The film does well to have a little mystery behind it and the cast are generally rather impressive. One of the biggest problems is how quick it wants to start. I don't find that these films work without a decent amount of build up. Here, the camera crew walk in and stuff is happening almost immediately. I also got tired at the scientists continued explanations of stuff when it was clear that some of these things were impossible to explain. Some decent effects and genuine scary parts make this a fine effort, but with a bit more time and some better pacing this could have been so much better.

The widower Alan White (Kai Lennox) invites the parapsychologists Dr. Helzer (Michael O'Keefe),Ellen Keegan (Fiona Glascott) and Paul Ortega (Rick Gonzalez) to investigate a supernatural phenomenon in his apartment in an old apartment building. Alan is an unemployed agronomist engineer that lives with his four year-old son Benny (Damian Roman) and his teenage daughter Caitlin (Gia Mantegna),who blames her father for the death of her mother Cynthia (Laura Martuscelli) in a car crash. After witnessing weird events, Dr. Helzer and his team find the cause of the activities…or not?

"Emergo" is another boring and unoriginal movie that follows the "style" of "The Blair Witch Project" of making cheap movies with handy cam, no lighting and poor edition. There are a couple of scary moments but along the 80 minutes running time there are too much technical explanation for the haunted apartment by the annoying Dr. Helzer. This Spanish variation of paranormal activity is a waste of time. My vote is three.

Title (Brazil): "Apartamento 143" ("Apartment 143")

More and more and more footage is being found this day. Most of it hasn't even been lost. Like this which isn't really found footage, just recorded footage with added drama and effects. The story itself isn't that different from any other exorcism story and even in that field we had some really good movies (Last Exorcism to name one).

But the movie does have some scary (read: good) moments in it and some might even really love the ending (it's an entire different matter, if it makes sense or not). The relationships between the characters are nicely drawn, but everything plays in one apartment and there is only so much room to go (pun intended).