“I’m Roy. Welcome to paradise.”

Drake’s rating: A doleful swan song

Drake’s review: After a nine-year absence from the director’s chair following 2001’s Ghosts of Mars, John Carpenter returned to helm The Ward, a thriller set in a mental hospital in the 1960s. I’d like to tell you this was a return to form for a director known for his ability to craft a horror tale. Heck, I’d love to tell you that.

I can’t lie to you guys, though. Really, I can’t. My Mutant Contract demands honesty. It also demands reviews for John Carpenter Week, and right now I’m cursing the legion of Mutants a decade or so back who got to Big Trouble in Little China before me.

Kirsten (Amber Heard, All the Boys Love Mandy Lane) is a young woman who’s caught by the police after burning down a farmhouse. Taken to the mental ward of a local hospital, she comes under the care of Dr. Stringer (Jared Harris, Lincoln) and comes to know several other girls who are patients as well. Kirsten keeps seeing a shadowy figure in the hospital, which doesn’t help her in convincing Dr. Stringer that she’s in any way sane, and soon it’s stalking the other girls as well.

And honestly, that’s the film in a nutshell. A thriller rather than a true horror flick (although there are a few horrific moments), The Ward unfortunately is a fairly pedestrian movie. It’s not that there are any glaring errors with it, but there’s also absolutely nothing about it that makes it stand out. And there’s not a thing about it that screams that it’s a John Carpenter film.

Carpenter uses all of the “horror in a mental hospital” tricks here: electroshock therapy, straitjackets and semi-lucid nightmares while tranquilized. The problem, of course, is that we’ve seen it all before, and often better portrayed. Although shot at an actual mental hospital near Spokane, WA, the setting never feels spooky or macabre. In fact it’s all rather neutral, especially when compared to something like Session 9’s Danvers Hospital, as spooky a location as you’ll ever find. And to be fair, The Ward was shot at a functioning hospital rather than an abandoned one, but there’s still no sense of menace to the place and no feeling that danger might be lurking around every corner.

Kirsten escapes, and gets caught. Several times. Sometimes she’s alone, sometimes another girl is attempting to escape with her, but there’s no tension to the scenes because they always end the same way: with Kirsten locked back in her room. A decent supporting cast includes vain redhead Sarah (Danielle Panabaker, Sky High) and artistically-inclined Iris (Lyndsy Fonseca, Kick-Ass), but none of the girls get a personality beyond their mental illnesses.

And that’s unfortunate, because while a bad movie can at least be entertaining in its own way, The Ward is not even that bad. It’s just kind of… dull. The interactions between the girls are fine, the cinematography is okay, the actors all speak their lines in an orderly manner, and the movie steadily walks its way to a decent climax that, while not entirely unexpected, has been done before, and in far more imaginative ways.

John Carpenter’s films have been a very mixed bag following 1988’s cult classic They Live. Many of them have had good moments, but aside from In the Mouth of Madness it’s hard to drum up much enthusiasm to watch any of them again. I did have some hope for The Ward. It seemed like a good chance for Carpenter to concentrate on a small film and get back to basics, and in the process maybe scare the pants off of a ready and willing audience. Instead, my mind wandered a bit and I had thoughts of better times with ol’ JC, when he was turning out fun & frightening flicks like clockwork.

Will Carpenter ever get behind the camera again and turn out one last horror classic? It’s not impossible, but I’m not going to hold my breath on that one. I might turn blue, and that clashes with my DayGlo green eyes.

I know, I should stop holding my Mutant Contract up so close, but that fine print is really hard to read.

Intermission!

• Surprisingly, the film doesn’t use music by John Carpenter. The small setting and empty hallways of the mental hospital practically cry out for Carpenter’s synthesizers, but they are conspicuously absent.
• At least there’s some nice makeup work here by Howard Berger and Greg Nicotero. Berger and Nicotero are partners in KNB EFX GROUP alongside Robert Kurtzman.
• For a somewhat tenuous John Carpenter connection, Amber Heard’s stunt double, Michelle Sebek, also did stunt work in Halloween and doubled for Laurie in Halloween II.
• Okay, okay. They weren’t the original Halloween movies. They were the Rob Zombie remakes. Or re-imaginings. Or reboots. Or whatever the kids these days are calling misguided attempts at resurrecting classic films. I told you the link was tenuous.