** (2010)
"Carpenter... the master of shock" - yeah, shockingly bad!
YES! HORRORTHON IS BACK! I LOVE OCTOBER!
Sorry, I had to get that out of my system. Okay, on with The Ward.
A girl, running through the woods in North Bend, Or (which is actually southwest of Bend, OR - I looked it up) circa 1966, trying to go undetected by the police. She stops to burn down a small farm house. The police find her, fire in progress, and take her to a lovely asylum, where she is placed in the skinny teenage girl ward. There, she simultaneously bonds with the other teen girls, endures questionable treatments by the possibly vindictive hospital staff, and starts to notice "Alice" the ghost.
Grrrrr! I'm an angry teenage girl!
I really had high hopes for this one. Supernatural horror films are my favorite. I first saw the preview for this movie at the end of last summer. I was very excited to see it in the theaters, but then, it never came out. There really isn't anything particularly bad about this film, it's just so dull. And, I suppose that's the thing with Carpenter. Halloween and Halloween 2 were very basic films built more on tension rather than gore and cheap thrills. It was innovative and it has influenced dozens if not hundreds of films that came after it. If The Ward came out in 1976, maybe it would have been better and more original. But, since there have already been so many other better TV shows and horror films that did better with the mental hospital setup or the teen girls fighting the ghost theme, The Ward, seems played out.
