Year released: 2011
THE CHARGE: Being a bit too hard on The Beaver last night
THE EVIDENCE: John Carpenter has directed some iconic horror flicks: Halloween, The Fog, The Thing and the woefully underrated In the Mouth of Madness. So you would think that The Ward, the first feature film he’d directed in nearly ten years, would be a big deal; a project worthy of an auteur returning to his milieu. But then you remember that this is the same John Carpenter who directed Escape from L.A., Ghosts of Mars and the overrated snoozefest Prince of Darkness. And suddenly, the mediocrity of The Ward makes a lot more sense.
The story opens in the mid-1960s with 18-year-old Kristen setting fire to a farmhouse. Cops show up quickly and she’s taken to a psychiatric hospital where she discovers that the previous occupant of her room was killed by a ghost. Kristen eventually learns that this ghost is seeking revenge after the other girls in the ward who killed her but, for some reason, it’s also stalking Kristen.
Meanwhile, we occasionally cut to scenes of a young girl chained in a basement, where her large, shadowed captor is about to do something nasty. And if Kristen discovers the link between the ghost and the girl, she’ll most likely end up dead.
I’m not going to get too heavily into spoilers, but I’ll just say that if you’ve seen the John Cusack/Ray Liotta thriller Identity, then you’ve already seen The Ward. The biggest difference is that Identity was a stylishly shot brain twister with A-list talent while The Ward is a cheap, derivative b-grade sleepwalk.
It's like The Breakfast Club, with 100% more breakfast.
The sparsely furnished hospital and the dimly lit rooms where you can’t make out any details of the set betray The Ward’s low budget, and they look even worse when compared to the scenes featuring the captured girl. These scenes are artfully composed, with colored filters and slow camera pans that really show off Carpenter’s exquisite ability to build a feeling of dread. It’s almost like they came from another movie, because the rest of the flick looks like a public access soap opera.
The acting is no great shakes either. Amber Heard stars as Kristen and I can’t recall the last time I saw a horror movie heroine alternate between boring and unlikable like she did. Lyndsy Fonseca fares better as Iris, one of the other girls in the ward. I got a bit of a Heather Langenkamp vibe about her, and her character is the least abrasive of the bunch by far. Guess who gets killed less than halfway through the story?
The oatmeal facial didn't work as well as expected.
Not that the story is all that impressive. It takes 80 minutes to kill off five characters and run paint-by-numbers style through various horror clichés... seriously, does EVERY night at the hospital have to be a Dark and Stormy Night? Then we get two minutes of clumsy exposition explaining the entire movie for us and revealing the Big Twist. (Because every horror flick since The Sixth Sense has to have a Big Twist. Damn you, M. Night Shamalayan!) Anyway, I thought movies were a visual medium, so why not find a way to show us the twist instead of describing it to us? Finally, it all culminates in a final scene that looks so embarrassingly cheap that the movie actually starts fading out before the scene is over.
Between the low budget, the poor acting and the shamelessly derivative script, one wonders what could have drawn John Carpenter out of semi-retirement to direct The Ward. Maybe he wanted to dip his toe back in the water before attempting a more ambitious project that never happened? Who knows? But despite all its flaws, it’s still better than Escape from L.A.
THE VERDICT: The Ward is GUILTY of wasting talent on a lethargic and embarrassingly unoriginal story. I just hope it's not the final rusted nail in the coffin of Carpenter's directorial career.
