This week, B-Movie Enema has something new for you, my dear Enemaniacs!

Yeah. This week, it’s the first ever movie directed by John Carpenter that gets the review treatment here at the blog. Sure, he’s been mentioned. After all, I’ve done several entries in the Halloween franchise. His longtime producing partner, Debra Hill, got featured here too with Confessions of Sorority Girls which was a part of a whole series of movies she did for cable channel Showtime that was remaking or reinvisioning old-school 50s exploitation films.

But 2010’s The Ward is the first time I’ve actually covered a film directed by Carpenter. This film would not be well-received, nor did it make its money back against its budget. While I’m not sure if it was planned, he would ultimately step out of the director’s chair and focus more on making music before doing some executive producing and consulting on other projects. Most notably, he returned to the Halloween franchise with the trilogy that began with David Gordon Green’s Halloween in 2018.

Sure, I could do the same thing everyone else does online when it comes to a conversation around the string of movies he made that give people all the words to express their own nostalgia. These would be the movies like Halloween, The Thing, or Big Trouble in Little China. All fine movies, I agree, but I want to talk about the movie that I grew up with and loved the most – Escape from New York. That was a movie that I think my brothers went and saw when it came out and then watched it on cable all the time once it got there. Because they watched it, I watched it. I love how that movie looked. I loved the speculative future of a country that is under the boot of a stifling police state that turned New York City into a prison island.

Don’t worry about the logistics. It’s a world where the police are run like a military and they section off a whole bunch of land to imprison people within and basically overly patrol that area… and throw a lot of people into prison over charges that aren’t particularly… violent… Oh shit. Huh. Maybe it’s not a speculative future after all, huh?

Anyway, I do love the way it looks. Whenever I think about the movie, I think about the dark city and the lack of lights. I think about it from the position that you’re seeing something that looks like should be populated, but it simply isn’t. Even with movies like Ravagers that also had the concept of an empty city with a broken civilization, it’s not like the way Escape from New York uses the look and feel. I love Snake Plissken. Ernest Borgnine as Cabbie wanting to help Snake is great. Isaac fuckin’ Hayes is the Duke, the guy who runs all the criminals on Manhattan.

While I think I’ve ever only seen one John Carpenter movie that I flat-out dislike with nearly nothing positive to say about it, there is still a hierarchy of the ones I want to watch time and again among the others I do like. It’s impossible not to watch Halloween every October, especially if I’m tuning into AMC Fear Fest. While I recognize the greatness of, say, The Thing, I don’t think it cracks my top 3 when it comes to Carpenter’s stuff that resonates the most with me. After Halloween and Escape from New York, I also rank In the Mouth of Madness quite high.

So, with The Ward, this is the only film of Carpenter’s that I have never seen. I never even knew it was in theaters in 2010. Apparently, few did. Like I said, the movie failed pretty hard at the box office. Oddly, that is often the case with Carpenter’s filmography. Most of his movies are not successful either at the box office or with critics. He’s a master because he’s got a dedicated group of fans who love him. He’s nearly a cult leader in the realm of the horror genre. To some, he could never do any wrong.

The Ward has a trio of incredibly recognizable actresses in the film. First, our lead is Amber Heard. Now, I’m not here to comment on the extremely public trial she had against Johnny Depp. I don’t want to talk about that. I have lots of opinions that run counter to what most people said online and I’m not getting into it here. Also, we have Danielle Panabaker, who is probably best known these days for her work on CW’s The Flash series. We saw her previously in Piranha 3DD seven years ago. And finally… one of THE BIGGEST new stars of the last couple of years is making one of her earliest appearances in movies in The Ward – Sydney Sweeney. I promise this will be the better film of Sweeney’s compared to what we’ll see her in later this year.

It’s time to check ourselves into The Ward to see if this has the signifiers of a Carpenter film or if it would have been better that he not step back into the role of director for this one.

There are a couple of things to note right out of the gate. One of these things is not a usual John Carpenter element, and the other is something that he often employs but not the first thing you think about when it comes to his filmography. The first is that this is technically a period piece. The movie takes place in the mid-60s. I don’t think there has ever been a John Carpenter movie that doesn’t take place in present day or the future. Certainly, The Ghosts of Mars wasn’t present day in setting. Then, the Escape movies (NY and LA) are both in the near future. Carpenter never shied away from utilizing looks or shots that resembled other genres that would have evoked a different time period, but he’s not one who did a lot with the past at all.

The other thing that is at play here that is something that actually is more common than most realize, but not the first thing that comes up whenever you think of Carpenter is that this movie is almost entirely set inside the walls of this North Bend Psychiatric Hospital. In fact, it was one of the deciding factors for him to take on the project. Carpenter has always been good at limiting the settings. The Thing and Halloween are all taking place in a very limited space. The greatness of Prince of Darkness is that it mostly has these characters all inside this large church for a massive amount of the runtime. A big chunk of Big Trouble in Little China takes place in Lo Pan’s subterranean hideout or literally right above it in Chinatown. Again, we don’t always immediately think about it with Carpenter, but he is really good at using his locations, especially when the locations are very limited.

Alright, so like any psychiatric hospital, this place is spooky. It’s dark. It appears mostly empty, and just about every sound inside the halls or in the basement sounds supernatural. A peculiar set of footsteps is heard coming for one particular resident of the hospital – Tammy. Tammy was aware someone was coming for her. As the footsteps got closer to her room’s door, she got out of bed and cowered in the corner. When the door opened, she let out a full-throated scream.

As if the person coming to the door was Michael Myers himself, the girl is picked up by her throat with a single hand and her neck is broken.

The credit sequence is pretty cool. The credits play over shattering glass that shows ghastly and disturbing images of old-style ways that people were treated at psychiatric hospitals. The music has that baseline that is very John Carpenter-esque in sound. There’s a woman soprano doing spooky singing over it. It’s a little more than you typically expect in terms of a Carpenter credit sequence. He doesn’t typically use the credit sequence in this way to tell a little bit of story to set the stage for the movie.

The movie proper starts with a police car driving down a rural Oregon road. A woman named Kristen (Amber Heard) is hiding behind a tree while the car drives on. Kristen finds an abandoned farmhouse and uses a box of matches to set the curtains on fire. It would appear that Kristen is a pyromaniac.

The cops find Kristen admiring the fire she set and arrest her. She’s taken almost right to North Bend. They remove her dress and take pictures of her body. She has an address written on the palm of her left hand and she’s got a lot of bruises on her body. She is directed through the ward by the chief orderly, Roy. He tells her that he can be a friend or he can be a nightmare. It comes down to how well she follows the rules. Kristen is taken to Tammy’s old room to get rest.

While she sleeps, she dreams of a fire and her being held captive inside a barn. During the course of the night, something pulls her blankets off her body and under the bed. When she pulls the blanket from under the bed, there are charms that have letters on them. The next morning, the girls’ psychiatrist, Dr. Stringer introduces himself to Kristen and the nurse gives her pills to “make her feel better” to which Kristen drops and crushes with her feet. After all, Kristen is not insane. She just seems to have very spotty memories.

Since it’s morning, Kristen is allowed to leave her room. She meets the other girls in the ward. Emily is the first to approach her, but she’s seemingly the most troubled of the girls. She acts standoffish and even seems to have insight about something peculiar in the ward as she asks Kristen if she’s there to save them. The most quiet girl is Zoey who suffered from such deep trauma that she acts and dresses like a little girl. Danielle Panabaker is Sarah. She’s promiscuous and very flirty with Roy the orderly, but is also incredibly vain and a little stuck up. Then, there’s Iris. She’s the first to really try to befriend Kristen. Iris comes off as maybe the least “crazy” of the five of them. She certainly doesn’t act as aggressive as Emily or like a little girl like Zoey or self-absorbed like Sarah. She seems like a typical “good” girl and is constantly sketching things in her notebook.

Kristen is called to Stringer’s office for a session. She asks why she’s being held there. She doesn’t seem to remember anything before the fire she set. She has no idea what significance the farmhouse she burnt down has. She doesn’t even know why its address was written on her hand. She most definitely does not want the doctor’s help. She wants to be released and promises she’ll stay out of trouble, but that ain’t happening.

That night, she uses a letter opener that she snagged off the doctor’s desk while he was distracted to unlock her room’s door. She’s caught by Roy and basically dragged back to her room. When she finally goes to sleep, she has another odd memory of being shackled in a barn. However, the girl in the barn seems to be a young girl.

The next day, Kristen spots a trio of people watching them from a window. It’s a couple who are observing along with Dr. Stringer. Emily refers to the man and woman as “the sad people” and Iris explains that Stringer is a brilliant doctor and he’s there doing some experimental therapy. Kristen wants to know what to say to this doctor so he’ll lift the nighttime lockdown. Iris says that’s not going to be possible. But Kristen says she saw a girl walking around the halls the night before. It’s quite possible it’s the same girl who came for Tammy previously.

While the nurse is away from her station, Kristen tries going through some of the records. Kristen is curious why they are being given the drugs they are as it seems pretty intense for what their issues are. None of them seem particularly insane. While Emily is the wildest of the five of them and Zoey is clearly dealing with trauma, it’s not entirely sure why Iris and Sarah are here and why they are all so heavily medicated. However, these five girls are being specifically sequestered in this particular ward.

When alone in the shower, a dark figure watches Kristen and then attacks her by grabbing her throat. The figure is a girl who looks something like a cross between a zombie and a really bitchin’ Iron Maiden album cover. When Kristen screams, the nurse comes running in but only finds Kristen huddled in her shower stall. When she tells the nurse that something is wrong in the shower and she was not alone, the nurse sedates her. Now drugged, she’s taken to electroshock therapy.

At the following day’s group session, Emily wants to know what happened to Kristen. Stringer says they had a little “unscheduled late-night therapy” session. Emily says she was worried because sometimes girls are taken away at night and they don’t come back. Iris mentions the name Tammy and she slips up by telling Kristen that she was the last girl who “got out” of the ward. Kristen wants to know who Tammy is but Stringer won’t say anything.

Later, Iris tells everyone she’s off to what she thinks is going to be her last session with Dr. Stringer. She thinks his comments on how well she’s been doing are a sign that he’s going to release her. Sarah and Emily don’t buy it for a second that she’s going anywhere. Stringer somehow has some of her drawings. One of them shows a shadowy figure in the halls of the ward at night. She says that drawing is an older drawing. Stringer opts to hypnotize Iris to learn about something in her past from eight years ago.

An orderly comes to escort Iris back to her room. Stringer says she’s asleep in his office, but she’s not there. She’s being wheeled to an operating room by the spooky chick that killed Tammy and attacked Kristen. There, the spooky chick performs a lobotomy on Iris through her eye. Kind of fitting for someone named Iris, am I right? Eh? Eh?

Eh.

When Iris doesn’t return to the ward, Kristen gets concerned. She tries to ask the nurse if Iris was sent home, why didn’t she take her sketchbook – the one thing she always has with her at all times? When she takes Iris’ sketchbook, she finds a drawing of a girl she doesn’t recognize. She discovered that girl’s name was Alice Hudson. Kristen realizes the charms she found on her first night have the letters to spell “Alice”.

At her next session with Stringer, Kristen asks who Alice is and why there seem to be so many girls going missing in this ward. In fact, even though she was sedated, she remembers the nurse erasing the name of someone next to her door. Stringer says that classic “I’m sure you thought you saw what you saw…” thing, but then Kristen starts assuming the girls are dead. And maybe she should have said this a little more tactfully to the guy who is running the psychiatric ward you’re stuck in, but Kristen says she’s pretty sure there’s a pretty pissed-off ghost here at the hospital.

Back in the ward, Kristen asks the others who Alice is and they all get a little cagey. Sarah says she doesn’t converse with loonies, and that gets her a fresh slap across the fuckin’ face from Kristen. Emily says Alice was one of them but she’s gone now. Emily claims Alice got let out. Eventually, Zoey says, “She won’t let us leave…”

Later that night, Kristen and Emily rig their doors so they can get out. They plan to find Iris and escape. They sneak into another part of the hospital through a ventilation shaft. In the basement morgue, Emily snags a couple of scalpels. When they hear someone coming into the room, Emily hides behind a desk and Kristen hides in a room where she might not be alone. When Kristen comes out of the room, she hears one of the morgue’s drawers rattling and when she opens it, a ghoulish hand drops down to grab her. She runs into the hospital lobby where she hears a girl say Alice’s name and she’s is startled by the ghoulish girl standing right in front of her. She falls and hits her head on the floor.

When she comes to, Roy is there to collect her and take her back to the room.

The next morning, Kristen wakes up on the floor of her room. Emily comes into her room and says she got caught by the nurse. Kristen says that she didn’t find Iris and they have to accept that she’s gone. Emily says they will never be let out.

After a blow-up between Emily and Sarah, Sarah storms out of the room just thinking everyone is jealous of her. She looks in her compact mirror and sees the spooky girl in the reflection behind her. She screams and runs away, but because Emily turned up the TV in the common area Kristen doesn’t know if what she heard was a scream or something else so she doesn’t investigate. Sarah tries to hide in a room only to discover the spooky girl is behind her again and covers her nose and mouth until she passes out.

Sarah wakes up strapped down in the surgical chair. She pleads for her life and even calls the spooky girl “Alice” saying she had “no choice”, and that “they made her do it”. Alice straps a band around her head to give her a whole bunch of electroshock therapy. So much, in fact, it fries her brain and causes her face to melt from the inside out. When the lights to the whole place flicker, Kristen asks where Sarah is. Sarah’s room is packed up like she was released… or she was never there at all.

The stuffed bunny that Zoey always has with her has the initials “A.H.” (for Alice Hudson) on one of the feet. Zoey reveals that she never did anything to Alice. It was the other girls. Kristen demands to know what the hell that means. Emily refuses to answer. Zoey says Alice was bad. She constantly hurt all the girls. Tammy told the other girls she could make it stop. The girls set the situation in motion to get rid of Alice. Zoey told Alice that Tammy had her bunny and Sarah put a pillowcase over her head. Sarah, Emily, Iris, and Sarah held down Alice and suffocated her with the pillowcase.

Badda bing badda vengeful spirit.

The big question is… Why is Alice after Kristen? Emily has had enough and threatens to commit suicide by slashing her wrist with one of those scalpels she lifted from the morgue that one night. Kristen tries to talk her down by telling her and Zoey that they are going to get out of here.

But spooky girl Alice is quick to act and grabs Emily’s hand with the scalpel and uses it to slit the girl’s throat when Kristen looks away.

Right away, when a girl is killed, their room is packed up as if they are no longer in the hospital. Kristen uses Zoey as a fake hostage by holding a scalpel to her throat and forcing the nurses to back off. However, she’s got her back to the elevator and that’s when Roy disarms Kristen and throws her against the wall to restrain her while the main nurse sedates her again. However, Dr. Stringer intervenes and says he still has to try to help Kristen. The distraction gives her enough time to bite Roy’s arm to make him let go. But Stringer grabs her and the nurse sedates her.

During the struggle, Kristen yells that Alice Hudson is trying to kill them. By the way, during one of the scenes, the girls are watching the movie Tormented about a vengeful ghost haunting a guy who was involved with her death. Nice tip of the cap by Carpenter to include that Easter egg.

Kristen once again escapes her room and knocks out both Roy and the nurse. She gets Zoey and she’s able to get away from several orderlies and nurses until they are forced into the stairwell by Alice’s ghost. Using a dumbwaiter, Kristen sends Zoey up to the first floor, but Alice appears in the elevator shaft and kills Zoey. When the dumbwaiter returns, Kristen is able to get on it just in time before an orderly catches up to her.

Once out of the dumbwaiter, Kristen tries to find Zoey but discovers only a trail of blood. Soon, Alice begins chasing her. The two have a struggle with Alice pretty good and tossing Kristen around like a ragdoll. Kristen takes a fire axe and hits Alice with it right in the chest. Seemingly, Kristen has defeated Alice.

Alright! So it seems the movie is resolved, right? Sure, those other girls are dead, but Kristen seems to have destroyed Alice… Right? Cool! Then why are there still 12 minutes remaining in the movie? Well, that’s because there’s a twist ending!

Yes, my Enemaniacs. This movie is actually a trio of mysteries wrapped up into one film. The first mystery is who Kristen is. That mystery began with her just showing up at the start of the movie and setting fire to an old farm. On top of that, it seemed as though Kristen was also having nightmares about a little girl in a barn being chained up and abused by an older man. That was easy to forget as the rest of the movie up to this point began to play itself out. It wasn’t as important to figure out who Kristen is when there’s a scary spooky monster roaming the halls of the ward and killing these girls.

That began the second mystery – who is this monster girl? Well, we learn that it’s Alice. Alice was this girl in the ward who was a massive dick and the other girls all had a plan to rid themselves of her. That then led to Alice starting to stalk and kill them one by one… But that also included Kristen. Why is that?

And now the twist…

Kristen is found by Dr. Stringer. He explains to her that there’s more going on than the vengeful spirit of Alice Hudson going around. Alice has what was known back then as multiple personality disorder (known today as Dissociative Identity Disorder or DID). Her additional personalities were as such:

So… wait. Yeah… This is something of a situation seen in The Sixth Sense. Stringer tells Kristen her name is Alice Lee Hudson. Hudson’s multiple personalities were formed after a specific trauma that took place eight years ago. She was kidnapped in 1958 and held for months in an abandoned farmhouse – the one she burned down. Her psyche fractured and she created these other versions of herself.

Yeah… The movie starts showing flashes of past scenes where we saw the other girls, specifically Kristen, but it’s not the “Kristen” we knew, but actually Alice. After years of being in the hospital, Stringer has finally discovered ways to isolate the personalities through experimental treatments. With a little more time, he plans to reconcile all of these fractured bits of Alice and make her whole again. Through these warring figments of Alice’s psyche, the ghost version of Alice was created to prevent them facing and dealing with the various traumas that the individual personality is trying to work through. Essentially wiping out the personalities instead of facing the problem. Wiping out the personality of Tammy created Kristen – the alpha personality that is too strong and smart to be destroyed by the ghost Alice. It’s also why as soon as one of the girls get “killed” by Ghost Alice, her room was packed up as if no one was ever in there to begin with… because no one ever was.

Kristen and Ghost Alice have one final fight in which they are both seemingly thrown out of the window. Stringer finds Alice still alive, and she’s taken to the infirmary to be healed from the fall. Her parents come to visit her and they are the pair of people with Stringer earlier who Emily called the sad people. Stringer says that Alice seems to be cured, but will need a lifetime of therapy, but doesn’t seem to be a danger to herself anymore.

As Alice packs her things to finally go home with her family, she opens her medicine cabinet to find Kristen lunging out at her proving that Alice has not yet removed that personality from her psyche yet.

I think this is a sneakily good movie. It doesn’t really have the hallmarks of the typical John Carpenter movie. Elements of it seem to kind of feel flat like he’s still doing his Masters of Horror or Body Bags stuff on Showtime. That said, there is an older feel to this movie that I like. It’s not just that it’s set in 1966, but…

Oh yeah, that reminds me. So I said there were basically three mysteries – Who was Kristen, who was Alice, and what were those dreams, right? Well, there was a mystery I had running through my mind earlier which was the mystery of why this movie was set in 1966. On the surface, it didn’t really matter when it took place. Nothing about the movie screamed 1966. Sure, there was a fun scene where the girls were all dancing to a song on the record player, but if it was 1966 or 2010, that song could have been used. I came up with my own conclusion when the movie played out its twist.

There were only two times in which we saw the staff of the hospital with more than one girl at a time. The first was during the group session with Stringer. The second was the attempt to escape with Kristen holding Zoey hostage. That second scene was the only one that seemed to have a moment in which an employee “touched” two girls at the same time when Roy disarmed Kristen and tossed Zoey out of the way to safety. You can kind of handwave that second part as kind of inconsequential in the end because something far more important happens in that scene.

Throughout the movie, the girls are seemingly very poorly treated by the staff of the hospital in ways that seemed very inappropriate. The men weren’t doing inappropriate things, but everyone treated the girls like assholes. Roy was physically imposing and tough on the girls. The nurse, named Lundt, outright says to Stringer that he’s an idiot to actually think he can cure the girl. She has totally given up on the girls. So I figured it was easier to sell the idea that these orderlies and nurses were assholes to the girls if the movie was set in 1966 as opposed to 2010. It was far more likely to treat the mentally unstable in horrible ways and see them as wastes of resources to care for them.

So the conclusion I came to was that the setting of 1966 covered up the truth of these characters in a sneaky way. On the surface, you can say these girls are in a really bad place and it heightens the psychological horror of it movie. But, when you dig a little deeper, these are not psychiatrists. These are people who have to deal with Alice exerting a personality who is stubborn or violent. They can feel like Stringer’s treatments are not working when they have to deal with this girl being unpredictable in any interaction. So, yeah… Cover that up with the setting and let people who realize how bad things were for residents in psychiatric hospitals in the 60s believe that is the cause for the weird and poor treatment of the girls.

I dunno. I dug it. Some people might not like this movie due to it being kind of a slow burn, however, I do think the movie does a good job of setting the atmosphere, tricking us with the zigs and zags, and I liked the jump scares with Ghost Alice. This movie is readily available on streaming platforms. I’d recommend checking it out and determining for yourself.

Tomorrow, there’s a new episode of B-Movie Enema: The Series. For this episode, we’re visited by The Louisiana Hussy. Check that cheese out here on the website or B-Movie Enema’s YouTube or Vimeo channels, the B-Movie Enema Roku app, or tomorrow at 6pm your local time on OtherWorlds TV. Links for where you can watch as well as where you can follow BME on the socials can be found to your right. Next week, we enter September with a home video action classic from 1991 – Quiet Fire! Be sure to come back on Friday for that!

Alright, I gotta get out of here because I’ve got an electroshock therapy appointment I need to be getting to.