John Carpenter’s the Ward | Film review
Nothing lurking in the halls is as scary as Carpenter’s reputation.
HEARD 'EM SAY Amber, right, and Mamie Gummer are all ears.
Someone—or something—is stalking the lockdown ward for hot twentysomething nymphets at the local nuthouse, and whatever it is, it’s not nearly as scary as Carpenter’s lingering name-above-the-title reputation, which still staggers around, zombielike, despite the fact that the man hasn’t made a watchable film in more than 20 years. How do you have the pulp precision of, say, The Thing, and then lose it, like car keys?
This modest indie parties like it’s 1985, complete with a shrivel-faced VHS-box ghoul and old-fashioned boo cuts, following Heard’s bland lusciousness as she struggles to escape from said hospital before the bogeyperson adds her to its arbitrary roster of corpses. Of her wardmates, only Gummer looks as if she’s strayed in from the real world, and only once—with a lovely and spontaneous sock-hop dance to the Newbeats’ “Run Baby Run”—does the movie break out of its Carpenterized clichés. There’s an odd (read: low-budget) vagueness not just to the film’s mid-’60s time frame, but also to the plot holes pocking the heroine’s travails—cuing us to some sort of inevitable reality-bites twist ending. Well, the broken-glass title sequence was boss.
