The eye candy at the end of the world

Just in case the Mayans got it right, this is The Agitation of the Mind signing off in the company of 13 favourite femmes fatale. It's been a pleasure.

13 FOR HALLOWEEN #13: The Ward

‘The Ward’ – John Carpenter’s return to the big screen after nine years and the nadir of ‘Ghosts of Mars’ – suffers from two things: one minor and one that couldn’t really be helped. The minor problem is the inclusion of a cheap last-minute scare so arbitrarily incorporated that the film ends not with the shiver but a groan. The other is that is came out the same year as ‘Shutter Island’ and a year before ‘Sucker Punch’. Conceptually and in terms of their narrative third act, these three films inevitably get pigeonholed together. And whereas ‘Shutter Island’ had the big budget and the epic sweep, and ‘Sucker Punch’ five girls in short skirts and an epic sweep, ‘The Ward’ kind of gets forgotten. That Scorsese’s and Snyder’s films proved divisive and engendered screeds of internet debate, while Carpenter’s plays extremely fair and doesn’t delve into histrionics, pushed it further towards the sidelines.

Personally, ‘The Ward’ is my favourite of the three. If ‘Shutter Island’ is a sweeping symphony and ‘Sucker Punch’ a triple gatefold prog-rock concept album, then ‘The Ward’ is a three-minute punk single: raw, blunt, unpretentious and stripped of anything it doesn’t need.

In a short, creepy pre-credits sequence, the inmate of a psychiatric institute is seen cowering from something stalking the corridors outside her cell. Next thing it’s in her cell and it’s goodnight Vienna. The credits themselves are an artful concoction of sepia images – all with an asylum/disturbed psyche/mental illness theme – fragmenting as if made of glass. That’s your first clue, right there.

Then we’re off good and proper, as a police car belts along a country road – a title card tells us it’s 1966 – while a girl hides in the woods, watching nervously as it passes. Meet Kristen (Amber Heard); the next thing she does, after a quick sprint through the trees, is burn down a farmhouse. There’s a mixture of terror and exhilaration in her eyes as she watches the conflagration, and can I say right here and now, for the record, what a freakin’ terrific actress Amber Heard is.

While the building is still burning, the aforementioned police car comes sweeping up and Kristen kicks and struggles to minimal avail as she’s bundled in the back seat and cuffed. Swap the cruiser for an ambulance and Carpenter gets rid of the whole slow-grinding process of the legal system with a single cut as Kristen arrives at the North Bend Psychiatric Hospital under the care of Dr Stringer (Jared Harris) and under the suspicious and ever-watchful eyes of Nurse Lundt (Susanna Burney, channelling more than a soupçon of Louise Fletcher) and gruff porter Roy (D.R. Anderson).

She quickly meets her fellow inmates: the moody Emily (Mamie Gummer), artistic but delusional Iris (Lyndsy Fonseca), narcissistic Sarah (Danielle Panabaker), and childlike, frightened Zoey (Laura-Leigh). She’s assigned to a cell occupied by Tammy, of whom the others are unwilling to speak, and soon discovers two things. One, Stringer is an advocate of experimental therapy; two, the institute appears to be haunted. And Kristen strongly suspects that the other girls know more than they’re telling. Then the disappearances begin …

‘The Ward’ plays its string out for a good chunk of its fairly short (84 minute) running time, Carpenter building tension as effectively as anywhere else in his filmography. Everything coheres to convince you this is a straight-up horror movie, including a grotesque and somewhat J-horror inspired ghost girl who perpetrates some pretty nasty acts. With its scenes of electro-shock treatment taken to the extreme and the kind of eyeball trauma normally reserved for a Lucio Fulci production – not to mention a sequence of flashbacks which culminate in a pretty unambiguous inference of paedophilia – ‘The Ward’ trawls the very rim of its 15-rating.

But Carpenter plays fair with the twist, seeding pertinent information throughout and delivering the big reveal with the minimum of expositional dialogue. Harris has the appropriate gravitas as Stringer to make the scene work, and Heard delivers a convincing vacillation between raw anger and shocked disbelief. I’ll say it again: Heard is fantastic. In fact, kudos to the whole cast: Gummer, Fonesca, Panabaker and Laura-Leigh give it their all, while Anderson finds a recognisably human quality in a character that could easily have come over as a sleazeball or a thug. There’s a wonderful little scene where he’s stuck with the repairwork following an escape attempt by Kristen, his labours interrupted by the flirtatious Sarah, and the look on his face and the weariness in his voice totally sell Roy as a wage-slave with a thankless job who really appreciate it if everyone would just piss off and leave him alone.

Yaron Orbach’s cinematography recalls the glory days of Dean Cundey’s collaborations with Carpenter’s. Mark Kilian’s score is also reminiscent of Carpenter’s stripped-down, atmospheric work as composer. And yet – maybe because it trades on generically obvious heavy-handed foley work and by-now-cliched ghost-girl visuals rather than breaking new ground – ‘The Ward’ doesn’t quite measure up the old-school Carpenter. And maybe this, as well as the reasons mentioned in the first paragraph, accounts for the indifferent box office response. Nonetheless, with lesser fare pulling in the punters, it was just criminal that ‘The Ward’ did such poor business.

Even allowing for the four years between ‘Ghosts of Mars’ and his superior episodes of the TV show ‘Masters of Horror’, and then another four years between those works and ‘The Ward’, Carpenter seems to have relapsed into inactivity. I really hope ‘The Ward’ doesn’t prove to be his swansong but if that is the case, then he’s bowing out on his best feature-length film since ‘They Live’. (Mr Carpenter, in the unlikely event that you’re reading this, I’d like to keep doing 13 For Halloween on this blog for a good many years to come, and I’ve reviewed an awful lot of your filmography already. More films would be greatly appreciated.)

Amber Heard

Happy 26th birthday to the very cool, and quite definitely photogenic, Amber Heard.

SUMMER OF SATAN: Drive Angry

In which John Milton (1608 – 1674) loses his sight, wrestles with the big questions of humanity’s relationship to the divine and writes an epic poem that begins with man’s first disobedience and –

No, wait. Let me start over.

‘Drive Angry’. In which John Milton (Nicolas Cage) breaks out of hell in shriek of burning rubber and a cloud of petrol fumes, busts back through into the world of the living, and goes in vengeful pursuit of the Satanists who murdered his daughter and are intent on sacrificing his infant grandchild.

‘Paradise Lost’ – the whopping free-verse poem about good, evil and everything inbetween – has about as much connection with the aesthetic of ‘Drive Angry’ as ‘The Canterbury Tales’ does with ‘Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS’. That Cage’s character is called John Milton is best dismissed as the film’s unfunniest joke and all thoughts of epochal works of literature put to one side.

‘Drive Angry’, directed by Patrick Lussier, is a ribald throwback to 70s exploitation. It mixes the backwoods Satanism of ‘The Brotherhood of Satan’ and ‘Race with the Devil’ (in a nod to Jack Starrett’s film, the devil-worshippers’ preferred mode of transport is an RV) with the tyre-squealing car-porn of ‘Vanishing Point’, ‘Two Lane Blacktop’, et al. And it throws in a cluster of giddily OTT and luridly executed set-pieces, the likes of which make ‘Machete’ look like an exercise in mumblecore.

How OTT? Well, there’s the scene where Milton and The Accountant (William Fichtner) – a man deeply unappreciative of the negative impact Milton’s absconding from Hades has had on the figures – race each other across a bridge probably half the length of a football pitch. The sequence is so protracted, with exchanges of dialogue, exchanges of shots and characters swapping while they reload a variety of weapons, that before it’s half done you start wondering when exactly the bridge was extended – it suddenly seems to be a couple of miles long.

How lurid? Weeeeeell, take your pick from these two: Milton’s shagfest with a cocktail waitress interrupted by gunmen, whom he clinically despatches whilst still, ahem, maintaining his rhythm; or waffle waitress Piper (Amber Heard) quitting her job, returning home unexpectedly early, discovering her lowlife boyfriend in flagrante with another woman, and dragging said homewrecker naked out onto the lawn and putting her down with a couple of roundhouse punches thrown like a pro.

Yup, ‘Drive Angry’ gives you naked women, casually ridiculous violence (be it hand-to-hand, gunplay or the improper use of handtools), fast cars and Nic Cage not giving a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut that he’s pissed off the Prince of Darkness (“What’s he gonna do,” Milton sneers at one point, “not let me back in?”)

Cage isn’t quite as deliriously back on form as in ‘Kick-Ass’ or, definitively, ‘Bad Lieutenant, Port of Call: New Orleans’, but he’s still a lot more plugged in and giving it some than we’ve come to expect. Heard – playing the acid-tongued tough chick who finds herself along for the ride – is a blast: sexy, sassy, ass-kicking and attitudinous, the kind of gal whose pint you definitely wouldn’t spill. She’s more than just a foil for Milton; she gives the film a frisson that kicks it up a gear, pushing it beyond its obvious T&A/cars/guns laddishness.

Just as good – almost miraculously conjuring an inspired piece of characterization – is Fichtner. The idea of Nic Cage (whose income tax blues were being slaveringly reported on while ‘Drive Angry’ was in production) being pursued by an implacable suit-wearing nemesis called The Accountant is a concept so meta it could have overbalanced the film: a one-note snidey joke on which large amounts of the narrative are predicated. Thank God, then, for Fichtner, who turns the character into a slightly prissy but stop-at-nothing antagonist. The only way I can describe it is as if Dirk Bogarde had played the T-1000.

‘Drive Angry’ is a filmic slab of Marmite – you’ll love it or hate it, and be hard pressed to find an indifferent review. Me, I laughed like hell for the 100-minute running time, developed a new-found appreciation of Amber Heard and bumped up William Fichtner a fair few places on my cool list.

Race with the devil? Donut with the bad dude, more like.