Starring: Amber Heard, Jared Harris, and Danielle Panabaker
Plot: Kristin (Amber Heard) is a young woman committed to a psych ward among girls her own age. She is being haunted by a supernatural force, one her peers seem to know about.
Review:
This was to be John Carpenter’s return-to-form horror movie after a big hiatus after the cinema abortion that was Ghosts of Mars. It starts off seemingly like classic Carpenter-Halloween. There is a mysterious killer picking off teenagers. The added bonus here is that all of the girls are suffering from mental illness and are currently living in a mental asylum.
The first time we see our hero, Amber Heard, is beaten and bruised with cuts all over her. She is obviously very upset and sets fire to a farmhouse. She kneels and weeps as the cops pull up behind her. These beginning minutes are very atmospheric. Unfortunately, Carpenter isn’t able to hold this tone consistent. The cast certainly has potential to make it a great movie. Up and comers like Lyndsey Fonseca and Danielle Panabaker do not necessarily struggle with the material, but they certainly don’t add any life to the very empty words. Amber Heard is definitely strong here. Her emotions are genuine, but her actions make it seem like the beginning was an epilogue, not a prologue. She has too many wits about her to have just freaked out and burned down a building.
Jared Harris is solid as the psychiatrist, but again he just seems like he is sleepwalking through the performance. He does not seem all that interested or invested in the girls. The only swells in emotion he shows are when the girls freak out or get violent, and that emotion is specifically frustration and anxiety over the possibility of them hurting themselves or someone else. He is completely burdened by the plot. John Carpenter is holding on to one last card, and the fact that he never shows it to us until the very end of the movie.
SPOILERS
Carpenter than delivers an ending that is totally cliche and been done before. It turns out that each of the girls is a dissociative personality, and the ghost-slasher that is attacking them one by one is the original personality trying to take back her mind. This is basically the same ending as the movie Identity, except Identity also delivered a pulse pounding “Ten Little Indians” style kill story with fantastic characters.
END SPOILERS
Don’t turn around!
Conceptually, I thought it was a great idea to set it in a psychiatry ward, but it was kind of wasted. It should have been a combination of Halloween and Assault on Precinct 13: a cat and mouse game in a claustrophobic setting. Unfortunately, the claustrophobia does not exist. The ghost slasher is never taken full advantage of. She comes and goes, but she is barely there.
Rating: 3/10
