Stevieboy666
Set in 1966 Amber Heard plays Kristen who sets fire to a farm house and consequently finds herself in a psychiatric hospital, which appears to have only a handful of young, attractive female patients. She soon becomes convinced of an evil presence in the shape of a female ghost. Hardly original, there are countless movies about haunted mental asylums, and to be honest most of them are rubbish. But with horror maestro John Carpenter at the helm surely this was going to be good. It's well acted, has good production values, a few cheap jump scares, a couple of gore scenes, a reasonable twist ending and a good closing credits musical score.
Sadly the film is just not scary, or even memorable. Apart from the fact that it is a John Carpenter movie that's a million miles from his classics.
kuarinofu
Well, sadly enough, it took me exactly 21 minutes of this movie to catch the twist. Obviously, I lost all interest in this movie right away because there was nothing new for me to discover any more. The whole movie is based around a twist that is in plain sight. This is not what you would expect from JC. I'm a big fan of his work, I've seen most of his movies and I fairly enjoyed all of them for what they were. Even the lesser known - The Fog and Prince of Darkness - all have that feel only JC can give you. Like, hell, even the Vampires had such a charm.This feels like it was directed by someone else and just had JC's name slapped onto it.
NateWatchesCoolMovies
John Carpenter's The Ward isn't a particularly remarkable film, and it's certainly not a very scary one, but there are aspects that I really enjoyed, one of which being the excellent original score, which Carpenter actually didn't compose himself, for once. The film gets off to a great eerie start with opening credits that are the most evocative sequence of the whole thing, leading into the tale of one seriously disturbed chick (Amber Heard) who finds herself in a whacko mental institution, plagued by the ghost of a restless former patient. A befuddled Doctor (Jared Harris) knows more than he let's on, of course, and her fellow patients are similarly tormented by the phantom. Here's the thing: it's well plotted, acted and executed, save for one thing: it's never scary. Not once do the hairs on the back of your neck stand to attention, and a horror film should have that. I loved the psychological sudoku of an ending, but even there there was no creep factor to be found. Her fellow patients all have parts to play, including Danielle Panabaker, Laura Leigh Claire, Mamie Gummer and a standout Mika Boorem who steals the show from Heard right in the final act. Works as a thriller, padded with atmosphere here and there, but could have done with a better dose of chills to sweeten the deal.
gwnightscream
John Carpenter's 2010 horror film stars Amber Heard, Mamie Gummer, Danielle Panabaker, Laura-Leigh Claire, Lyndsy Fonseca, Mika Boorem and Jared Harris. This takes place in the 1960's focusing on young woman, Kristen (Heard) who is taken to a psychiatric hospital after setting a farmhouse ablaze. She meets Dr. Stringer (Harris) and patients, Emily (Gummer), Sarah (Panabaker), Zoey (Claire) and Iris (Fonseca). Kristen and the girls become hunted by a ghost of deceased patient, Alice (Boorem) and Kristen discovers the significance of her occurrence. This is OK, Heard is pretty good in it, there's gruesome make-up effects by Greg Nicotero & Howard Berger as usual and the film sort of resembles Carpenter's previous film, "In the Mouth of Madness." Carpenter or horror fans may want to view this at least once.
AD
