A mere two days after enduring the obnoxious, amped-up postmodernism of Joe Cornish's Attack the Block, the decidedly more relaxed, neo-classical genre craftsmanship of John Carpenter's The Ward (2011, John Carpenter) arrived as a breath of fresh air. Understand this, though: The Ward is more of an exceedingly well-directed okay movie than a legitimately good one. Still, even if the unoriginal and predictable script by Michael and Shawn Rasmussen prevents Carpenter from reaching the heights of his The Thing or Big Trouble in Little China, the filmmaker's compositional rigor and infectious glee at working with familiar genre tropes invigorates the cliches enough to make this worth a look for die-hard fans.
The setting is a sinister mental-patient ward, which is hardly a novel one, although Carpenter's tracking shots down the ward's corridors during stormy evenings strike the right ominous tone. This is where Kristen (Amber Heard) is admitted after a fit of pyromania, although she insists her sanity is above reproach. In an effort to adjust to her new surroundings, she bonds with her fellow female inmates and makes her required appointments with the hospital's psychiatrist (Jared Harris, whose plummy, Rex Harrison-esque Britishness works for a character with ambiguous motives). But frequent nighttime visits from a pissed-off ghost understandably heightens her desire to escape the ward.
Carpenter builds nicely to an increasingly intense third act, and he remains an expert at delivering scares that don't cheat. And while his decision to stock the ward completely with perfectly-coiffed hotties is questionable, for plausibility's sake at the very least, he doesn't make the mistake of sleazily ogling and violently exploiting his young-female cast the way director Zack Snyder did with his own, thoroughly vile female-mental-ward yarn Sucker Punch. Even the obligatory shower scene is shot and cut for maximum tastefulness, if you can imagine such a thing.
It helps, too, that the distaff ensemble does fairly solid work. Mamie Gummer is a standout as Emily, the ward's only patient to fully embrace her looney-tunes status (since Gummer is Meryl Streep's daughter, she truly is a chip off the old block). In the lead, Heard botches a couple of her more emotionally demanding scenes, but she still exudes a forceful charisma befitting her "It Girl" status.
Even viewers whose past exposure to insane-asylum genre flicks consists only of having seen recent entries Sucker Punch (which this is vastly superior to) and Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island (which this is vastly inferior to) will know exactly where the story's heading. But old pro Carpenter makes getting there mildly fun. Grade: B-
More of a whatsit than an actual movie, The Perfect Host (2011, Nick Tomnay) delights in narrative rug-pulling that is entertaining for the duration of the movie but fails to hold up to even the slightest scrutiny once it wraps up. A riveting, delightfully odd star performance from the perpetually underutilized David Hyde Pierce (Niles from TV's Frasier) does its best to cover over the massive plot holes and debut writer-director Tomnay's shoddy filmmaking, and the spectacle of his unhinged performance combined with the out-of-left-field plot twists almost manage that feat. But, as they say, "almost" only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades.
Another liability is actor Clayne Crawford's charisma-free and woefully amateurish work as John, a bank robber on the run who coerces Pierce's Warwick to let him into Warwick's posh abode by pretending to be a friend of a friend. Warwick warns John right off the bat that because he's throwing a dinner party, John can't stay for long, though John's impulse is to stay in the safe harbor of Warwick's house for as long as possible.
That describes the first act of The Perfect Host, and it would be ungenerous of me to outline the remaining two acts. It would be sufficient to say that the more loopy surprises the movie throws at the audience, the more entertaining it becomes while simultaneously making less and less sense. The narrative hinges on coincidences and lapses in logic so hard for the rational viewer to swallow that one has to decide either to go with the madness or resist it. I straddled the middle ground; I felt like my intelligence was insulted, but I can't deny I had some fun in the process.
Let's admit it--any movie that gives Pierce an extremely weird dance number isn't a total waste. With his skills far exceeding Crawford's, The Perfect Host is an unusually imbalanced two-hander. But Pierce is so rarely given such a juicy leading role that I could frankly care less who he's sharing the screen with. Grade: C+
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