Director: John Carpenter
Stars: Amber Heard, Jared Harris, Lyndsy Fonseca, Sali Sayler
Me and ghost horror films don’t get on well. It’s not that I’m shit scared of watching them. They just don’t really seem to catch my imagination, excitement, and enthrallment. Very rare cases do.
There’s nothing different about most of them especially when most of the reasons they lurk about is from being the deceased remains of someone who was wronged or evil. Or both. Or maybe, a Scooby-doo villain.
A good movie memory was when I watched What Lies Beneath when I was 15. Scared the fucking shit out of me in the cinema, perhaps I didn’t expect it but hey I remember the viewing experience fondly. It may not stand the test of time, sure. But when I look back at that film, I have happy memories of good cinema experiences.
And that’s the thing with most ghost films. I try to find the positives in them but when they’re all about loud shunting noises, annoying characters, and a repetitive ending. I don’t tend to go out wanting to see them. I remember watching The Grudge US (hated it), Reeker (hated it), Boogeyman (hated it) to name a few and still don’t find these sort of films entertaining. It doesn’t make me want to go watch the original Ringu, or Grudge, or similar films. I know I should but when I have repeated bad experiences, it’s not a genre that screams out to me immediately to watch.
And I’m sorry for that god awful pun.
And The Ward is yet another aggravatingly bad experience.
I’ll be honest. I’m not a familiar voyeur of John Carpenter films and this is probably the wrong one to start viewing if I wanted to get into watching the films of a very renowned and respected horror director. But I think I really should have just asked someone to borrow their copy of The Thing, I’d likely enjoy that a bit more. Probably tons more than The Ward.
The problem with The Ward is that it’s uninspiring, unoriginal, and quite frankly…dull. It’s like it’s trying to mesh Girl Interrupted with Identity with say any recent ghost movies. And it fails. It splats against the small hole it was supposed to be melded into in the first place. It sadly plays out more like a TV movie than anything else considering Carpenter’s association with Masters of Horror.
It’s a group of mentally unstable girls locked up in a ward where the ghost of one of their former patients is stalking and killing the girls one by one. Leaving the naturally sane, yet also unbalanced, good girl played by Amber Heard, to question what on earth is going on. Obviously, like all normal horror tales, no one is inclined to believe her including the head doctor played by Jared Harris.
It really doesn’t take a genius to figure out what happens.
Then they decide to be really, really, smart and throw in a twist that is eye rolling bad.
Then they add that traditional never ending ending.
Well done, everyone involved. You’ve just annoyed me for another 90 minutes.
I really don’t want to be mean but when I’ve seen it all before, it’s hard to be positive about my experience with The Ward. The acting isn’t as bad as other films. Amber Heard and Jared Harris actually are really watchable in the flick. It’s just annoying that the same potholes of horror logic just come into effect and considering this is from a revered director who brought us the original Halloween (not the Zombie crap), The Thing and other cult titles, it just feels disappointing.
Can someone lend me the copy of The Thing now and show me how good Carpenter is, please?
