The Ward is the latest from director John Carpenter, who hasn’t had a movie in theaters since 2001′s Ghosts Of Mars. That movie was awful. It had Ice Cube in it. Ice Cube the rapper. And, still The Ward is worse. Much, much worse. Which I thought was impossible. If 2011 has shown me anything, it’s that when it comes to movies being bad anything is possible.
The Ward follows young Kristin (Amber Heard) as she is mysteriously institutionalized in, you guessed it, The Ward. She is locked up after she sets fire to an abandoned farmhouse. At the ward, she meets four other young women who,of course, treat her with scorn at first and then let her into their circle after they bond over how much they hate their current place of residence. Things start to get wonky, and if this was a better movie scary, as one by one a ghost kills off the women at the hospital. The mystery behind why and who is doing the killing isn’t much of a mystery and the twist ending is laughable and not intentionally.
The Ward is the least horrifying horror movie I have seen in a long time. It’s not scary at all. It felt like a really bad version of Sucker Punch. This movie is straight-to-basic cable worthy. In fact, the movie was released through many cable providers’ On Demand services before it hit theaters this week.
I love John Carpenter’s early work. I think he was a movie-making pioneer who never got his due. I think his version of The Thing is one of my favorite movies of all time. I was so disappointed with how The Ward turned out. But, it’s not all his fault. He didn’t write it. He just took the paycheck.
0 Pitchforks out of 5.