Someone sold his soul to get a quote on the poster.
I have seen a few comments recently saying how good it is to see John Carpenter back making horror movies where he belongs. I haven’t seen anything that points out he hasn’t made even a semi-decent film for well over 15 (Escape from L.A.? Naaaah)… 20 (Memoirs of an Invisible Man? Naaaah)… (Big Trouble in Little China = Very good) 25 years! And it has been nearly 30 years since The Thing, his last decent horror flick.
So let’s not get all ‘revival’ crazy here. By the way, The Ward isn’t going to be remade in 20 years…
Set in the North Bend Psychiatric Hospital in 1966, The Ward is a lazy replica of many other films, most of them crappy. You know how movie-related toys are big business now, especially limited edition models and exclusive variants? Well The Ward is an exact copy of a stock standard movie-toy, only with red wheels instead of the normal black. Oh and there are plenty of these around so they ain’t worth much.
Back to the tedious The Ward: Kristin is an 18 year old blonde firebug sent to the ‘naughty ward’ of the hospital. This particular ward is designed to exact cinematic specifications, replete with the grumpy nurse, the slightly creepy doc and various other young photogenic psychos with varying personalities, diagnoses and hair colours.
Kristin goes through the usual “Why am I here? I shouldn’t be here!” routine, which was a surprise to me; ‘ummmm, you burned a house down and stood outside watching it go up in flames bitch!’… and she is equally puzzled when she starts spotting things out of the corner of her eye, and noticing that things move when they shouldn’t.
It soon becomes clear that the other few patients know a little more than they are letting on, and when they start vanishing with monotonous regularity and those remaining start saying things like “Bad things happen in the dark” we know that Kristin will spend a lot of time running down corridors in the next 40 odd minutes.
And in truth I wouldn’t necessarily hate that film, but The Ward has the suckiest ghost in recent movie history, and the same unsatisfactory ‘look we wrote a twist!’ ending as a billion other shit films. (They can’t all make enough money to justify making more can they?)
So we get the requisite run-run-run-run-run stuff followed quickly by the she’s-right-behind-you’s and the no-wait-she’s-over-there-now’s, only without a decent threat and a pay-off that I still feel gipped about.
I hated The Ward, the only good thing about it was that it was so similar to a dozen other movies that it becomes a bland blend of fuzzy memories that rapidly disappear. The only ‘fun’ I had was trying to pick which of the patients I’d seen before in other things (the love interest from Kick-Ass was one).
Which brings me to Amber Heard as Kristin, who over the past 5 years has worked her way up from mediocre horror movies to… more mediocre horror movies. Oh and she was in one of the shittiest Nic Cage movies of the last few years in Drive Angry, which is like saying one of the ‘lesser’ Britney albums I guess.
Final Rating – 4.5 / 10. Yes ‘Bad things happen in the dark’, in the case of The Ward they start soon after the previews finish and the cinema lights dim.
