JOHN CARPENTER’S THE WARD
Directed by John Carpenter
Produced by Doug Mankoff, Peter Block, Mike Marcus & Andrew Spaulding
Written by Michael Rasmussen & Shawn Rasmussen
Released by Arc Entertainment
USA. 99 min. Rated R
With Amber Heard, Mamie Gummer, Danielle Panabaker, Lyndsy Fonseca, Jared Harris, D. R. Anderson, Mika Boorem, Susanna Burney & Laura-Leigh

For his first movie since 2001’s execrable Ghost of Mars, John Carpenter emerges from a self-imposed retirement to return to the genre he largely created, the teen slasher pic. The Ward (or more correctly, John Carpenter’s The Ward, lest he escape the blame) is as tightly crafted and deftly staged as you’d expect from an old hand like Carpenter. It is, in fact, the kind of film the horror auteur could make in his sleep. And considering the astonishing absurdities of its plot, and its pervasive blandness, one wonders if that’s exactly how it was made.

Like most slasher pics, the movie’s purpose lies in finding inventive ways for attractive young women to die, but it tosses in bits pulled from related genres to flavor the broth: a scrap of the spooky old house picture here, a taste of the wrongly-imprisoned-in-the mental-asylum there. The film, set in the 1960s, opens on a pretty young blonde (Amber Heard) wearing only a slip as she tears through the woods, and, seemingly without reason, burns down a farmhouse. The girl, Kristen, is then committed to one of those great mental institutions the size of an aircraft carrier that have survived largely as a cultural memory. A handful of other messed-up girls keep her company in the locked-up ward, their personalities firmly bounded by the rules of their archetypes. There’s the bitch (Danielle Panabaker), vain and pointlessly competitive;  the innocent (Laura-Leigh), who sucks her thumb and coddles a stuffed bunny; a homely but helpful fellow blonde (Mamie Gummer); and a Velma-like artist (Lyndsy Fonseca), sexy despite (or because of?) librarian glasses. The gals are bullied by a Nurse Ratched-type overseer (Susanna Burney) and thuggish orderly (D. R. Anderson), and have occasional sessions with a surprisingly sensitive, and British, therapist (Jared Haris). But an evil presence lurks in the ward, and as the girls get picked off one by one, Kristen has to find a way to escape from the asylum while figuring out what lies behind the girls’ disappearances.

Acceptable, one would think, as a vehicle for delivering the goods (sex, violence). But the script is simply one heaping bowl of overcooked cliché gumbo. Although it’s credited to two human writers (Michael and Shawn Rasmussen), it seems like it was actually produced using experimental Google algorithms to fill in plot points. At moments of high suspense, lightning strikes. When attacked, women look into the camera and issue bloodcurdling screams. The ’60s setting is largely wasted, too, and only figures because the sort of involuntary institutionalization on display here wouldn’t be possible today. And other than tight jeans and a playful dance to a classic rock song, it’s only really suggested by the casting of one of those ubiquitous Mad Men alum (Harris), now trotted out for period films as if to create some Pavlovian connection with the past.

The psychology angle also goes nowhere. Despite an opening montage of real photographs showing the history of misguided psychological treatments, and the grim conditions of the asylum, whatever critique was originally meant is quickly abandoned. Instead of psychology we find its cinematic cousin, psycho-babble, and then only to explain away the film’s final, offensively implausible plot twist—an absurd, madhouse variant of “It was all a dream!”

Even at the lowest level, as exploitation, the film fumbles. There is, to be sure, an-all girl shower scene, but too discreetly filmed to be titillating. And the violence, using the sort of gruesome instruments on hand at an asylum—a lobotomy pick, an electroconvulsive shock therapy set—is, by the standards of the Hostel or Saw movies, tame.

Directors, it seems, have rather abrupt expiration dates. John Carpenter basically created by hand a whole idiom for horror and science fiction: Halloween, Assault on Precinct 13, and The Thing remake. When I was a child, he was my favorite director, and the first one whose name I knew. Now, he’s this almost tragic figure, a once-great filmmaker churning out fodder that belongs on the SyFy channel. Do you find this phenomenon in other arts? Wasn’t Yeats still writing masterpieces on his deathbed? It’s not, perhaps, fair to compare the creator of a teen-themed fright flick about a killer fog (um, The Fog) to the writer of Under Ben Bulben, but They Live (1988) was pretty great—the best satire of Reaganism involving aliens and a professional wrestler ever filmed. And to go from They Live to The Ward… that, and not what’s haunting the asylum, is the real mystery here. Brendon Nafziger
July 8, 2011