10 Exact Moments Awesome Movie Directors Stopped Trying

Throughout the '70s and '80s, John Carpenter was one of the most reliable genre filmmakers working: the likes of Assault on Precinct 13, Halloween, The Fog, Escape from New York, The Thing, Christine, Starman, Big Trouble in Little China, and They Live won him a loyal legion of fans.

Sadly Carpenter's Hollywood cred basically fell off a cliff in the '90s, with a glut of mediocre (if hardly terrible) films before his career basically died a death with the shambolic critical and commercial dud Ghosts of Mars.

But even then, Carpenter still seemed like a director just one hit movie away from a comeback, and when his 2010 film The Ward promised a back-to-basics horror film on a lower budget, it seemed like just the vehicle to get him back on track.

Sadly, The Ward turned out to be a mere hired gun project for Carpenter, a generic, forgettable effort which confirmed the director's sheer apathy with its howlingly predictable plot twist.

As many fans had predicted from the movie's trailers alone, The Ward basically pulls an Identity and has all the focal inmates of the asylum turn out to be warring personalities within the mind of a single character. Yawn.

And to make matters worse, it also ends on an even more predictable jump scare. Terrible.