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The Worst Film Ever

A Masterpiece!

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Blistering performances.

Well, sadly enough, it took me exactly 21 minutes of this movie to catch the twist. Obviously, I lost all interest in this movie right away because there was nothing new for me to discover any more. The whole movie is based around a twist that is in plain sight. This is not what you would expect from JC. I'm a big fan of his work, I've seen most of his movies and I fairly enjoyed all of them for what they were. Even the lesser known - The Fog and Prince of Darkness - all have that feel only JC can give you. Like, hell, even the Vampires had such a charm.This feels like it was directed by someone else and just had JC's name slapped onto it.

John Carpenter's 2010 horror film stars Amber Heard, Mamie Gummer, Danielle Panabaker, Laura-Leigh Claire, Lyndsy Fonseca, Mika Boorem and Jared Harris. This takes place in the 1960's focusing on young woman, Kristen (Heard) who is taken to a psychiatric hospital after setting a farmhouse ablaze. She meets Dr. Stringer (Harris) and patients, Emily (Gummer), Sarah (Panabaker), Zoey (Claire) and Iris (Fonseca). Kristen and the girls become hunted by a ghost of deceased patient, Alice (Boorem) and Kristen discovers the significance of her occurrence. This is OK, Heard is pretty good in it, there's gruesome make-up effects by Greg Nicotero & Howard Berger as usual and the film sort of resembles Carpenter's previous film, "In the Mouth of Madness." Carpenter or horror fans may want to view this at least once.

Let me start off by saying, that I am a Die-hard Carpenter fan. I grew up on all of the man's movies and I can say without a doubt in my mind that he is my favorite director of all time, he is a true visionary. Carpenter's last film before this was Ghosts from Mars, and while sub par, at least that movie was ENTERTAINING! This film is a total friggin bore fest!The acting in this movie is quite frankly terrible, everyone in this film is either a total stiff with no emotion or a zany moron with no direction in character. It's just all a big mess. The dialogue is also god awful, it makes me wonder why Carpenter chose to direct this script seeing how he didn't write it himself, which is most of the problem. The plot follows a young girl who happens to be a runaway, she torches a house but she is recaptured by the police shortly after doing so. From here, it's just all downhill. She is sent to the psychiatric hospital, which you would think of as a good suspenseful setting, but you would be wrong. John Carpenter is supposed to be the master of suspense, second to Hitchcock, it's evident by going back and watching some of his horror classics like Halloween and The Thing. Yet, in this hospital, there is absolutely NO atmosphere and no feeling of suspense, the main character is written as a strong woman, but I think that takes away from her performance a lot. Because as she is so focused on being strong, it seems like she is not at all human, she hardly gets scared and she hardly seems to care much, she's just such a bland character even with the ridiculous backstory of hers. A strong supporting cast would have helped her out a little bit more, but you sure as hell won't find that here. These supporting characters are equipped with stupid hokey quirks that don't give them any real character aside from doing stupid random stuff because they are apparently "so wacky and crazy but ohhhh so lovable!" But OOHHH wait THERE'S MORE there's even a twist! That's right! We have dark pasts that deceive you from our silly and cliché fronts! This sounds more and MORE like a Shyamalan film! These characters do nothing but sit around and spew bs to one another and then when one of them gets killed, they're all caring. I don't care about a single one of these characters when they die and let me also just say that the actresses are ironically PAINFULLY bad at acting like they are in agony when the ghost girl you've seen in every other movie kills their horrendous personalities off. While the concept of an evil hospital with a dark past seems promising, with surely promised elements of claustrophobia and suspense, this is thrown out the window in favor of cheap jump scares that I never would expect from a great like John Carpenter. 2/10 Bad movie, Great Director. Just stick to Carpenter's earlier work and I think you'll be good.

John Carpenter without a doubt, has shown ingenious taste in the horror and science- fiction genre; his success either the slasher classic 'Halloween' and the sci-fi/horror hybrid 'The Thing' speak loud volumes. His success continues for many years to come before taking a ten-year hiatus from the silver screen after his failure with the science-fiction thriller 'Ghost of Mars' in 2001. This supernatural thriller sees Carpenter return to the big screen, but the results show that Carpenter seems to have lost his flair over the ten years of his break. From an acclaimed director like Carpenter, you would expect to be awarded with great scares, an entertaining plot, and maybe some characters you come to care about, all of which this seems half empty of. To worse, this movie falls deep into elements that feel awfully familiar to other more superior horror flicks. So what's the story here? The film is set in 1966 in Oregon where we meet young runaway Kristen (played by Amber Heard) who is arrested by the cops after destroying an old farmhouse, letting it burst into flames. Subsequently, he is sent to a mental rehabilitation center where she meets psychiatric Dr. Gerald Stringer (played by Jared Harris) who performs mysterious experiments on his patients along with her inmates Emily (played by Mamie Gummer), Sarah (played by Danielle Panabaker), Iris (played by Lyndsey Fonseca), and Zoey (played by Laura Leigh). Soon, Kristen and her inmates begin terrorized by the ghost of former patient Alice Leigh Hudson (played by Mika Boorem) who was murdered after an escape attempt.John Carpenter has seen better days of filmmaking in his career than this, but has also seen worse. Compared to his other projects, this is just one of his minor entries so expectations may pave low, even for die-hard John Carpenter fans. Sadly, most of his appealing style he brought to his projects back in the 70s and 80s seem lost here. As this movie was done a rather tight budget, there is only some much Carpenter can spit out. The film has some scares that fall into category of hit-and-miss, some of them are effective such as the shower scene, others however are either dull, clichéd, or just cheesy jump scares likely make you shrug your shoulders than jump in fright. Many of the scares are associated with a creepy music score by Mark Kilian which fits quite well for the somber atmosphere. If you are someone who grows tiresome of constant jump scares, then brace yourself because there's a lot of these. John Carpenter also piles some elements that have been executed better on other horror entries including the ghost of Alice Leigh Hudson that look lot like the deformed little girl from the Exorcist movies, but it's certainly not enough to fulfill a terrifying experience to please viewers. The twist ending however, fits surprisingly effective and fills plenty of nuance to the story, even if feels borrowed from other films. Lastly, the performances by the cast particularly Amber Heard, Danielle Panabaker, Mamie Gummer, Lyndsey Fonseca, and Laura Leigh fit the bill, not likely to go down as any of the memorable roles in their careers.While it is nice to John Carpenter make comeback on his career, it's somewhat disappointing to see that his return had to be this one. This movie is a disposable supernatural vehicle that is bound to leave at least some horror fans satisfied but leave others vastly disappointed and yearning for better efforts.