The latter half of John Carpenter's directorial career has been thoroughly criticized. Sometimes deserved, other times too excessively so. Carpenter never lost his eye for talent. From casting Jamie Lee Curtis in HALLOWEEN and Kurt Russell in many of his early films to getting people like Amber Heard, Sydney Sweeney, and Jared Harris to star in this. He still can shoot widescreen with ease. He can still make a hallway look eerie. What I think he lost along the way was creativity and not having the right people around him. Without Debra Hill to help him write female characters, without Dean Cundey as his cinematographer, and without Tommy Lee Wallace as his production designer and editor, Carpenter feels lesser than the sum of his parts. This film has a $10 million dollar budget, all takes place in one setting, yet I found nothing memorable in how it looked. Some of the more interesting aspects of it are things that were done in horror films earlier in this century. Namely SESSION 9 and IDENTITY. I can't put all of the blame on Carpenter for this as the source material he was working with was weak.
Synopsis: Kristen is committed to a psychiatric unit where it seems an angry spirit of a former patient is haunting the girls who are being treated there. Kristen makes desperate escape attempts after the staff ignore her warnings about the spirit.
The film has a modern digital look to it. Yet from the IMDB page I think it was shot on film. That helps with the throwback look as this film is set in the 1960s. The clothing and the different look of the cars helps that. What doesn't help that is the CW casting. Amber Heard, Danielle Panabaker, and Lyndsy Fonseca are all beautiful to look at. I can't help but think I was watching a SUPERNATURAL episode though. Early on there were some great camera shots including a crane shot up the asylum building. Another wide tracking shot from a different room showing Kristen walking around.
The other girls in the psychiatric hospital are Sarah (Danielle Panabaker), Emily (Mamie Gummer), Iris (Lyndsy Fonseca), and Zoey (Laura-Leigh). While these characters are all shown to have different traits, none of them are particularly interesting or memorable. Sarah keeps trying to get one of the guards to go on a date with her, basically trying to seduce him so she can be free of the asylum. Iris likes to draw. Zoey is paranoid and likes keeping a stuffed animal. Emily is a wild-child. She likes to sing and yell annoyingly at random times.
From Top to Bottom: Lyndsy Fonseca, Danielle Panabaker, and Amber Heard. All of them appeared in films made around this time.
Jared Harris is an interesting actor, playing the interesting character of Dr. Stringer. He believes he can help cure Kristen and the other girls using hypnotherapy. The other nurses favor electroshock therapy whenever the girls' mental problems arise. One aspect of this film I think could have been elaborated on more was the treatment of the people who were committed. Kristen is repeatedly asked to take pills, put through electroshock therapy and physically restrained in many ways, including a straitjacket. The nurses seem to disagree with Dr. Stringer's methods yet nothing really comes of that. The way the employees at the psychiatric hospital treat all the subjects only benefits the plot at the time, rather than being something to explore.
Before I go into the spoiler section, because it will be hard to talk about this film much more without doing so, I wanted to talk about some other things I liked. There are some great kills. One involving a lobotomy, and one awesome throat slit. The score by Mark Kilian and THE NEWBEATS had an interesting theme with the human vocals. The score during the action and chase scenes however sounds like stock music. While the mystery to this film was incredibly predictable, I was still curious to see how it would all tie together. If more time was spent establishing an atmosphere instead of trying to be so fast paced like a wooden roller coaster with just the drop and no anticipation, it would have been a lot better.
SPOILER SECTION
Kristen keeps seeing visions of a disfigured girl named Alice (Sydney Sweeney). Eventually it is revealed that Alice was a patient at the hospital, and the other girls killed her. At the same time, Kristen also keeps having nightmares about a girl being tied up in a basement with a man coming in. This style of revealing a little more with each flashback may have been something Carpenter took from ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST. As all of the other patients are killed around Kristen, she eventually finds herself in Stringer's office reading the case notes. Stringer explains that the dreams she keeps having are of Alice, who was abducted at age 11 and continually assaulted by a man. To cope with this trauma she developed dissociative identity disorder, creating all of the other patients as different identities. Kristen is a new identity developed to fight back against Stringer's treatments trying to bring Alice back.
A young Sydney Sweeney plays the younger version of Alice. Pictured here with John Carpenter.
Now Carpenter did not write this film. Michael and Shawn Rasmussen did. That should be noted because Carpenter was executing what he had for source material. There could have been better attempts to create atmosphere by slowing down the rapid pacing on his part. Yet, there were so many things that could have been better within the writing. The beginning of the film is obvious. Kristen burns down the place where Alice was abducted. You know Kristen has been to this hospital. You know that everyone there knows who she is even if the film doesn't say it. As soon as you see the older people in the window you know they are Kristen's or Alice's parents. Now technically every girl is Alice, which in its own way is a problem because it makes all of the other characters irrelevant to me. None of them are developed except for basic traits, so we never route for any of them to overtake Kristen or be left alive. I would have enjoyed knowing these characters more to create more sympathy for them when they lost one way or another. Other than some things that look different and the outdated treatment methods this film doesn't feel like it needed to be set in the 1960s either. I found myself curious about where the mystery would go, even though I could see it coming. I didn't hate this film, or even dislike it. I am more disappointed by the missed opportunities to make it better in a lot of ways. While the characters, story, and atmosphere were just interesting enough to get me through one viewing, I don't see any reason to watch this one again.
Rating: 5/10
Trivia: The black and white film seen on the TV the girls are watching is TORMENTED from 1960.
Full Movie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eraYBv1JWZQ
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