Review: THE WARD - A Continuation of Carpenter's Decaying Horror Stature

By Shaun Munro / July 1, 2011

rating: 1.5

Easy though it is to laud John Carpenter's endlessly entertaining early works - from robustly mounted fare such as Assault on Precinct 13 and The Thing, to sillier but no less enjoyable flicks such as Big Trouble in Little China - the auteur's output as of late has been, to be kind, pretty naff. And by saying "as of late", we mean for the last two decades, for his last work to truly resonate was his deliciously subversive, Rowdy Roddy Piper-starring They Live. That was 1988. Efforts in the interim have ranged from the sporadically enjoyable guilty pleasures of Vampires and Escape from L.A., to the resolute horror - and not in the way Carpenter intended - of Ghosts of Mars, his last feature film. The Ward, a seemingly legitimate horror vehicle by premise and cast alone with which Carpenter could rebuild his throwback style, is less a return to form and more a continuation of Carpenter's present decaying stature as a relevant horror filmmaker, making his streak of no-hitters probably the longest - and certainly the most memorable and disappointing - that any talented director of any genre has suffered under. Fun though it is to skewer bad films, there's little joy to take in reporting that Carpenter's big comeback film is, in fact, a putrid, shrivelled dud; it's just sad. The Ward begins with Kristen (Amber Heard) burning her home down for reasons unknown and being sent to the local mental institution. Replacing former inmate Tammy - who disappeared under decidedly shady circumstances - she joins the four other loony femmes comprising the ward's roster, just as their numbers quickly begin to dwindle with curious efficiency. The top brass, consisting of the benignly sinister Dr. Stringer (Jared Stringer) and Nurse Lundt (Susanna Burney), dismiss their assertions - that there is a killer haunting the hospital at night - as mere delusions, while the girls are sure they know differently. Little more than an overly familiar, been-there-done-that ghost story, The Ward is keen to straddle genre formula without even the courtesy to be efficient at it. Enthusiastically embracing every horror cliché imaginable €“ as well as a few I hadn€™t thought of €“ from the apparently-evil-but-not-really supporting ghouls, to the litany of predictable jump scares that populate just about every €œsuspense€ sequence, there€™s not a single surprising bone in its body. It€™s a particular shame not only because Carpenter has been due a good script in quite some time, but also as some fairly atmospheric window-dressing €“ a soundtrack so old-school you€™d assume Carpenter scored it himself, and plenty of appropriately murky cinematography and grimy locales €“ completely goes to waste. The talent of pre-eminent scream queen Amber Heard fares little better; proving in All the Boys Love Mandy Lane that she can near enough carry a horror vessel on her own appealing qualities, not even her porcelain features €“ distractingly perfect for a psych-ward inmate, mind - and solid acting chops can overcome the script€™s seeming determination to leave everyone in sight floundering. As with just about any horror film set in a psych-ward, there are more than enough €œkooky€ nutters to go around, and they€™re at least a fairly eclectic bunch; Sarah (Danielle Panabaker) is the arrogant, self-involved nympho, Iris (Lyndsey Fonseca) is a nerdy lesbian, Alice (Mamie Gummer) is a more conventional odd-looking weirdie, and Zoey (Laura Leigh), the best of the bunch, is an emotionally stilted woman-child who still dresses up and talks as though she were six years old, to often (unintentionally) hilarious effect. While their various quirks and subsequent squabbles intermittently hold the attention, Carpenter has unfortunately failed to imbue his characters with little of interest beyond their archetypal oddities, nor has he at all exploited the fact that this is virtually an all-female horror flick (in contrast to, say, The Descent, which depicted female-to-female relations during a life-or-death crisis with disturbing aplomb). The suspense portions are risible (a scene in which the girls must hide from an evil nurse is blocked so lazily it€™s blindingly obvious that they€™re in plain sight of the assailant), the jump-scares yawn-inducingly predictable, and the final, last-minute twist €“ happily ripping off the better-executed climax of a certain rather good 2003 thriller €“ feels desperate and sorely underdeveloped in its haste. The Ward is a crushing disappointment and fuels the fire that Carpenter€™s career may not have met its nadir quite yet. Essentially a stitched together patchwork of better films albeit without their sense of horror, intelligence or humour, this is bargain bin fodder that somehow crawled out of the primordial soup long enough to gain a theatrical run. The Ward opens in the U.K. tomorrow