The movie starts off with some dude whose name I've already forgotten trying to find a job after he's been released from prison for killing a guy. The parole officer, if you're curious, is played by the old lady in Feast. You can tell that he's supposed to be the down-on-his-luck hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold character from the perpetually hangdog look on his face. He says he'll be living with his mother, who is actually dead, presumably starved to death because she was living in a closet. And we've all been there, right?
I'd crack a gay joke, but that'd be too obvious.
The guy finds bottles of anti-psychotic drugs in the medicine cabinet and assumes his mother was bat-shit insane. If I found half eaten cans of beans in my mother's closet, I might draw the same conclusion. I'd like to add that my mother once peed herself when she fell down the stairs. (Now you're famous on the internet, Mom!)
There's also a huge ass hole in the wall (not to be confused with a huge asshole in the wall) where he can hear the goings-on in the other apartment. First all he hears is a grinding sound and he assumes it's the pipes or whatever. Then he finds a paper towel filled with fingernails and blood on the keys of a piano, which is a detail that never goes anywhere. He gets a job as a mechanic and meets up with his old girlfriend, who is a waitress putting herself through art school to become a fashion designer. She even has a matching sassy blonde sidekick to complete the cliche. She and the guy meet up and she cries a little. I dunno, I was distracted during this part of the movie.
So the sounds start to escalate and the guy starts to hear voices in his apartment. There's a man in the other apartment who's beating up on his wife. He tries to intervene, but the guy's a cop and really big, so the main character shuts up. In the meantime, there's a creepy little girl running around the apartment complex and some dude across the way that keeps peeking in through the main character's window.
Hijinks continue for about thirty minutes or so when the main character finally finds the balls to call the cops on the couple next door, but when the cops bust the door in--surprise, it's empty. The rest of the movie is The Grudge, except in New York and a girl with a tiny piano instead of a kid that meows.
What the hell kind of movies do I watch, anyway?
The waitress girl goes to check up on the guy and first sees the woman knocking on the guy's door looking for help. She comes back a second time and gets the shit beaten out of her by the ghost of the husband, but the guy rescues her. Turns out that the woman and the girl were beaten to death by her husband and the entire complex pretended not to hear or assumed that someone else would call the cops, so the ghosts were understandably upset and were taking revenge on the tenants who ignored them. The guy ends up breaking the curse by opening the door and watching the woman beat her husband to death instead or something.
The moral of the story: call your landlord if you find a baggie full of fingernails in your apartment. Or, you know, the cops.
