Earlier today we suggested that our TIFF 2010 coverage was over. Oops, we lied....Poor John Carpenter. The one-time maestro of malevolence cooks up his first feature-length fright flick in a decade and ends up inadvertently playing second fiddle to Martin Scorsese. It's bad timing and worse luck — don't blame Carpenter for the eerie, unflattering similarities between his latest and the year's other '60s-set insane asylum thriller. Blame him instead for everything willfully derivative about this uneasy cocktail blend of tired ol' genre tropes.
One part supernatural slasher flick, two parts shaggy dog ghost story, "John Carpenter's The Ward" commences with a baptizing fire, the farmhouse blaze set by brainy beauty Kristen (Amber Heard). Her mysterious act of arson gets her thrown into the girls-only loony bin, where she grapples with both primitive practitioners of mental health (led by an amusingly evasive Jared Harris) and a murderous spectral hag. What do her fellow, marked-for-death patients know that they're not letting on? And what connection is there between this rousing round of "Ten Little Indians" and Kristen's own troubled past?
If you can't put the pieces together faster than this amateur Nancy Drew, chances are the baldly-telegraphed big reveal of "Shutter Island" snuck up on you, too. Thing is, that hoary bit of hokum, predicated though it was on an exceedingly predictable twist ending, at least offered a boundless bounty of virtuosic aesthetic wonders. The same can't really be said for 'The Ward,' which is handsomely made but completely bereft of memorable set-pieces.
Working again in theatrical widescreen, Carpenter glides through the halls and the corridors of his haunted hospital—a fairly convincing period milieu, achieved on a very restricted budget—with the voyeuristic guile of Michael Myers. If only he had such a dread-inducing boogieman at his disposal; this generic ghoulie evinces scarcely a shudder, and JC reduces her paranormal activities to a series of dully repetitive jump scares. Like Dario Argento, another over-the-hill prince of darkness, he seems to have lost his maliciously magic touch.Which is a shame, because there's enough potboiler potential in Carpenter's basic set-up—and enough gumption in his game cast of inmates-cum-victims, an all-girl variation on the usual cuckoo's nest of eccentric basket cases—to inspire visions of the enjoyable schlock that could have been. Forget "Shutter Island"; we would would have settled for the passable pleasures of "Halloween 2." [C] A.A. Dowd, courtesy of In Review Online
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