Netflix Junk – John Carpenter's The Ward

And The Ward Was Flawed...

• Starring a gold digger
• Directed by an aging sellout
• Fear Factor: Feeling one's mortality
• Enough alter-egos to fill all nine circles, except for Limbo

Whilst viewing John Carpenter’s all too ordinary psych ward thriller, ordinarily titled The Ward, I tried to keep a running log of all the irritating dialogue, character inconsistencies, and logical bounds that came to rise, only to see my notes get trumped by the revelation that everything I’d seen was just a hallucination of a crazy person.  This is the kind of cheap, anti-intellectual movie that almost defies plot-based criticism entirely, as the director, writer, whoever can always say that such and such a stupidity was merely imagined by the protagonist(s), who didn’t really exist in the first place, which begs the question of why I should care about their predicament at all.

The film revolves a bunch of one-dimensional but certainly attractive ladies, which makes it slightly distressing whenever one of them gets brutally and gratuitously “murdered” by the ghost that isn’t really a ghost.  What’s more, roughly half of them can actually act, but the performances were never going to be the principal reason for your watching this.  If The Ward had ever broken into the mainstream of society and somehow screened in front of feminazis with access to computers and the internet, it’d probably have gained a reputation for being exploitative, leery, and in poor taste, all of which it is at several points, but the casting is probably the most rational thing happening in an innately irrational film.  Assuming you’re stuck in a mental facility and are going to summon a score of alternate personalities to deflect the trauma of past kidnapping and sexual assault, you would probably go for a physically good-looking alter-ego over an ugly one, unless you just so happen to fantasize about masquerading as a hideous, wrinkly ghost girl.

Or was the ghost girl not even a personality to begin with, only a metaphorical abstraction of the doctors’ therapy gradually bringing the patient, Alice, back to reality?  That would at least make a modicum of sense in a viewer’s non-literal interpretation, but the movie sets up this backstory explaining that the ghost girl is seeking vengeance on the alternate personalities for asphyxiating her, the original personality.  How multiple personalities gang up on and permanently dispel another personality, only for that personality to return and start picking them off in turn, is one of the many conundrums of The Ward, along with:

Why would Alice create another personality just to burn down the house in which she was raped, and how could she do so if she was indeed detained in the ward the whole time?  Why do the cops who arrest her act so urgent and panicked after referring to her as a “little girl”, and why do they decide to cuff her only after they’ve thrown her in the car?

Is there any reason for the ward guards and nurses displaying so much menace (“I can be a buddy or I can be a thorn in your side – all depends on whether you follow the rules.”  “Good girl.  Nighty night.”) towards their mentally ill trustee other than to throw the viewer off the trail and impulsively conclude that they’re the bad guys?  Again, what cause do the doctors have for vocally wishing that “they’d fry the crazy out of everyone in here”, except to hammer home in no real-world sense the character’s delusion that they’re all sadistic mad scientists who get a thrill out of electroshock therapy?

Why do the older personalities instantly go out of their way to scare the newest addition to the group, and why does one say, “You seem to be getting in the way of things, new girl. If I were you, I’d watch out,” when I is actually you?

Why does the movie take a break for a pointless, cliché dancing scene, then cut it off just as quickly as it starts?

Why does newest personality Kristin tell the warden, “Just let me go. I’m not crazy!” when she’s admitted plainly that she doesn’t remember who she is or why she lit somebody’s house up in blazes?

Why did the writers decide to shoplift the whole metaphorical trope of “getting released” from The Giver?

Why do the ward workers say, “Wish they’d fry the crazy out of everyone in here,” when there’s only one person in there and they’re not even using electroshock therapy in the first place?  Is this only included to be ‘scary’ and lead the audience down a false trail?

Why does Kristin voluntarily stare into the magical ticking hypnotism needle when she’s made it abundantly clear she thinks the hospital authorities are corrupt and drugging her to keep her compliant with their sinister will?

Why does the warden tell her that she must “find answers” for her self?  Isn’t the pretense for keeping her in the ward that she’s crazy and can’t be trusted to roam free on her own?

Why do none of the girls stir when the ‘hot’ personality screams just a short ways down the hallway, especially when at least one of them is already on edge?  For the sake of the fiction, aren’t we supposed to assume that the patients all accept their own existence?  Wouldn’t Kristin display a more alert reaction to the panicked shrieking of a fellow prisoner than simply raising her head and asking five minutes later, “Where’s Sarah?”

Why does the ghost girl bleed and groan when she is struck?

But all these problems were just a product of the protagonist’s overactive imagination, so I guess they weren’t really problems at all.  The Ward cheaply overrules all typical narrative problems because nothing in its narrative is real, but this fact just as easily undercuts anything on which one would compliment it.  At least the score is sufficiently creepy, and the on-location cinematography is very professional for the most part, elevating an otherwise unengaging procession of predictable jump scares with some intense chases through narrow, meandering corridors.  The Ward is visually quite bright compared to other horror films, and the ghost girl monster thing’s ability to strike in broad daylight would generate some well-needed suspense if she actually looked halfway scary and always killed the other non-existent girls on the spot, rather than wheeling them off to her non-existent evil lair for more methodical, Saw-like non-executions.  The ghost of the ward is the most generic, post-Exorcist demon girl one could possibly conceive, and she’s all the more disappointing when one considers that she’s coming to us courtesy of the same John Carpenter who invented Michael Myers and enshrined the Thing in the halls of movie monster fame.

The funniest (and, in retrospect, most coherent part) is when the vain, attractive-but-not-really personality tries to flirt with one of the guards, who huffs, “There is no way I’ll ever, ever date you.”  The opening credits are also quite stylish, which is more than you can say of The Ward at any other moment.  In the end, though, the only basis on which anyone could recommend this is the same reason anyone would recommend Sucker Punch, as a somewhat more legitimate form of soft-core porn, and much like porn, it left me feeling icky and repulsed, a guilty beholder to the sick debasement of several actresses who probably couldn’t make it into anything else.

At least Martin Scorsese knew what he was doing and had a little fun with it, and Amber Heard has gone on to make an illustrious living slandering much more talented husbands to get their money.  Damn this movie.