Mister Sparta’s Creature Feature: Review of “The Ward”

by Jason Sparta, guest reviewer

Hello folks and welcome back to Mister Sparta’s Creature Feature.

Now, before I begin, let’s take a trip down horror memory lane at a director known for creating one of the most iconic characters in horror movie history, John Carpenter.  When you think of John Carpenter, what movies come to mind?  Big Trouble In Little China, The Thing, They Live, Vampires, and of course the iconic Halloween.  Being a so-called “Master Of Horror” John Carpenter seems to have a knack for the suspenseful and the entertaining.

Then there’s The Ward.  This movie has the usual John Carpenter touch of tension and suspicion on top of horror that leaves enough to the imagination for audiences to hearken back to the days when showing the blood and guts wasn’t necessary to be scary.  The problem with this movie, however, is that it has the Carpenter touch, which makes a lot of the plot points very predictable.

Now, that isn’t to say that this movie is a heaping pile of shit.  The girls that comprise the main cast of the loony bin’s answer to the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants actually perform very well and Jared Harris as the shrink Dr. Stringer works well.  The scene framing and the musical score help this movie out tremendously.

But, once again, we come back to the Achilles heel of this movie.  Predictability.  Yes, there is a twist in this movie that I can only describe, without spoiling it completely, as the spiritual successor to Identity.  And about a third into the movie, I was catching on to what was going on.  By the halfway mark, I had already predicted the ending.  You might be asking yourself, “But Mister Sparta, how is this possible?”

Well, boys and girls, I’ll tell you.  You see, the problem with setting a thriller in an insane asylum is that you have very little options on where to go with it.  Psychiatric ward horror movies are, by nature, very cookie-cutter in design and plot.  And on top of that, there’s the Carpenter style of movie making, which tends to resolve 99% of the plot and leave that last bit wide open with no intent to pursue resolution as a sort of middle-finger to moviegoers.  Not to say that it isn’t a good style of movie-making, but to do it for just about every movie you make?  It gets old after awhile.

Final Judgment?  You can pass on this one.  It’s a decent movie, but you can get just about the same story and the same ending with Identity.  Sad to say, John  just didn’t quite do this one right, which is hard for me to say because The Thing is one of my top favorite movies of all time.

Until next time, this is Mister Sparta and if it weren’t for the voices in my head, I’d have no intelligent conversations.

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