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John Carpenter’s The Ward

The opening title sequence- with the images of patients getting barbaric treatments- was scarier and more interesting than anything else in the first twenty-five minutes, which is when I stopped watching this.

Premise / Character / Structure/Plot

The girl was sent to a mental hopsital after setting fire to an abandoned house. Say what? Just because the story took place in the 1960s doesn’t mean it was plausible for such a girl to end up in a psych ward.

Considering the girl seemed like she was trying to burn an awful incident from her past, it would have been good to have a sense of her justification in order to empathize with her. Her ending up in the ward should have felt like a gross injustice. Instead, I didn’t care.

Then, inexplicably, the girl could not recall starting the fire or how she got its address on her hand. ?? That setup made it seem like the story would unravel her past, but instead the story turned to a previous, missing patient who was likely the ghost haunting the ward. Oh, and the ghost killed one of the other girls…who seemed innocent of any wrongdoing and I wondered, ‘Why did the ghost kill a victim of the system?’ Seems only the evil staff should have been targeted.

That’s when all this nonsense, disconnected elements and a lack of focus made me give up on the movie.

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