The Ward (2010)

Directed by John Carpenter
Starring Amber Heard, Jared Harris and Lyndsy Fonseca

No doubt Mr Carpenter should be forever revered for Halloween,  but that does not mean he can't make a bad film. Do I need to mention Ghosts of Mars? Or the tragic soundtrack to Vampires? The fact that this film is directed by him gives me hope. The fact that I never heard of it before fills me with concern.

In 1966 a pretty young girl named Kristen is caught setting fire to a remote farmhouse. She had no memory of why she is there or who she was before this act. She is summarily thrown into mental hospital.

Her room is a cell and the girls are 'locked down' at night but Kristen believes she has seen a girl roaming the corridors. The ward nurse is mean, the doctor seems nice. The four other patients are stereotypes: the child, the crazy, the priss and the whore.

The setting is perfect for a horror movie - dark creepy old hospital,  vulnerable young girls, trapped in the dark with lightening flashing outside - but it falls curiously flat. Scenes cut from one to the next with nothing really happening, it seems like bad writing as well as bad editing.

Kristen is terrorised by visions of a zombie-looking girl and it seems she's not the only one. Another girl is mercilessly lobotomised by the scary mary. I do like the fact that this monster defies classification.  She looks like a zombie but dissapears like a ghost, she's corporeal but cannot always be seen.

I expected the film to explore the themes of captivity and mental illness- is there a haunting or is she just crazy? are the doctors helping or using the patients for nefarious experiments? Will the girl stand true to her own mind or accept what she is told? Instead the film plays it as a straight haunting throughout and then offers a limp 'haha!' at the end - by which point I had already become completely pissed off by the implausible occurances and lack of explanations.

Not impressed John, not impressed. Think I'm going to give this woopsie a 3/10. You can safely avoid it folks.