A horror centered on an institutionalized young woman who becomes terrorized by a ghost.
Review
There's a feature on the site listed Actors That Lost Their Way.
It outlines my thoughts on certain actors who seem to have lost the plot and become self parodies of themselves.
If I was going to do a list which related to directors who lost their way John Carpenter would be right up at the top.
The last film Carpenter directed, before The Ward, was back in 2001 and was called Ghosts Of Mars. A truly awful film which starred such heavyweights as Natasha Henstridge and Ice Cube. Before that was 1998's Vampires, a meek effort that has aged terribly, almost to laughable status now. 1996's Escape From LA needs no words from me, everyone knows what a turgid, tragic effort that was and 1995's Village Of The Damned remake, well let's just leave that well alone.
All this from the man who brought us The Fog, Halloween, The Thing, Escape From New York and Big Trouble In little China to name but a few. Its a huge fall from grace and shows that Carpenter never really got to grips with the change in cinema after 1988's They Live. You kind of have to give him credit for obviously realising that he wasn't cutting the mustard and taking a ten year break from films, dabbling once of twice in television for the Masters Of Horror TV series.
Well he's back, fully refreshed and has gone back to his horror roots to bring us The Ward. Now I could be very harsh with this review, I could take into consideration what has gone before early in his career and hold this up against them. That would be unfair. I could on the flipside compare it to his last few films. Again this would be unfair. The film needs to be judged on its own merits and for what it is and when it is. The fact of the matter is that its a perfectly good, by the numbers horror. There really is nothing more to it than that.
Kristen is committed to a female mental asylum and starts to experience ghostly sightings along with the odd death here and there. She vows to find out the reasons behind this and go up against the evil entity only things are really what they seem. That's your story and that's what you get. Easy scares (hands appearing at windows), standard characters (the brash one, the quiet one, the horny pretty one) and a mysterious doctor (is he good or bad?) all lend to the standard story telling that's on show.
Everything about the film is just standard and perfectly acceptable. Its not bad, its not great, its right in the middle. Actors play their roles without ever having to try too hard, set-pieces work just as they are (lightning flashes in power cuts, looming shots of the building), a script that's not clever and has been seen before and a director playing it safe.
You'd think that with everything being so mundane it couldn't possible work but you do just enjoy it for what it is. At no point watching this did I think, its terrible, it's nothing like The Fog or even that its better than Ghost Of Mars. It is what it is and sits happily where it needs to be.
I'd like to think that this is Carpenter warming up, making this as safely and as acceptable as possible just to get back into the swing of things. We'll only know when, and if, his next one comes around.
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