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The Ward Reviews
An aggressively plain spook story that favors jump moments over sustained tension and winds up falling back on a particularly tired twist.
| Jul 11, 2011
Carpenter has made his approximation of a cheap, twisty, shock-filled modern horror movie, and he has lost all but faint sighs of his minimalist swagger in the process.
| Jul 8, 2011
Carpenter's economical but mundane chiller is possessed more by previous ghoul-friend flicks than it is by his better work.
| Original Score: 1/5 | Jul 8, 2011
A dull, by-the-numbers psych-ward horror thriller that's sadly a lot closer in quality to "Sucker Punch" than "Shutter Island."
| Original Score: 1/4 | Jul 8, 2011
"The Ward" is bland shock therapy from the guy who reinvented bloody peek-a-boo with the classic "Halloween."
| Original Score: 2/5 | Jul 8, 2011
Continues the painful decline of a director who seems more nostalgic for past glories than excited about new ideas.
Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Jul 8, 2011
How depressing to discover that John Carpenter is the man running this operation. His talent for building and sustaining suspense has now warped into flaccid attempt at fright and ogling ringers for Britney Spears and, in Heard's case, Scarlett Johansson.
| Original Score: 1/4 | Jul 7, 2011
We've seen everything here before and in a better film. John Carpenter used to be such a leader, it's hard to watch him follow and so far behind the pace.
| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Jul 7, 2011
The dialogue is never witty, the characters are indistinct, the story is set in 1966 for no relevant reason, and the scares are strictly of the "thing jumps loudly out of the shadows" variety.
| Original Score: C- | Jul 7, 2011
Basically, this is a ghost story merged with a slasher film and sealed with a Shutter Island twist. But at least Carpenter the spook-meister knows how to goose you.
| Original Score: B- | Jul 6, 2011
That this doesn't knock one backward out of one's seat is maybe unavoidable. But the goods here are good enough to make one eager for more.
| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jul 6, 2011
The Ward, Carpenter's first feature since 2001's Ghosts of Mars, has the logy, diffident attitude of a lost artist.
| Original Score: 1/5 | Jul 6, 2011
Feels an awful lot like a low-budget knockoff of Zack Snyder's "Sucker Punch."
Full Review | Jul 6, 2011
The kills aren't terribly suspenseful or dramatically staged and they quickly grow repetitive. Worst of all, they're not particularly scary.
Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Jul 6, 2011
Carpenter does what he's always done well here: individualizing shorthand personalities in a group under siege.
| Jul 5, 2011
Points for humaneness, I guess, but is The Ward scary? Not really.
| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jul 3, 2011
A musty shadow of the filmmaker's smart and stylish classics.
| Original Score: C | Jun 28, 2011
A run-of-the-mill gotcha-slasher.
| Original Score: C+ | Jun 9, 2011
It adds little to Carpenter's reputation.
| Jan 26, 2011
In the wake of Martin Scorsese's recent movie about almost exactly the same thing, it's tempting to rename this one Sh*tter Island.
| Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 24, 2011