djolley87

Four Boxes requires a lot of patience, but it's well worth the investment of your time. A little less than an hour into this film, I was sitting here asking myself - not for the first time - why I was watching such a boring and pointless movie. Then, all of a sudden, everything changed, and Four Boxes reached right out and grabbed me. In just a few shocking seconds of revelation, the filmmakers press all of the buttons for suspense and horror. It's instant brilliance, in my opinion. Then, having cinematically punched you in the face, the filmmakers follow that up with another surprising slap across the chops that completely re-frames what you just saw. Then, determined not to fall back on any conventionality, these guys deliver a decidedly weird and unexpected ending. There's more originality and daring filmmaking in this low budget, independent film's final twenty-five minutes than you could possibly scrape up across all of Hollywood.

The first two thirds of this movie seems like an exercise in futility about three characters living lives of quiet desperation. Trevor Grainger (Justin Kirk) and Rob Rankus (Sam Rosen) are two exceedingly average guys who supplement their incomes by acquiring the possessions of dead loners and selling them on EBAY. As they temporarily move in to clean out the house of the late Bill Zill, they're joined by Amber Croft (Terryn Westbrook), a girl who used to date Trevor but is now engaged to Rob. Apart from some love triangle friction, there isn't much going on here at all. Zill was apparently a pretty weird dude, though, who seemingly left behind some cryptic clues about something. For the most part, though, our characters spend a lot of time watching this little web site Rob discovered called Four Boxes. As he explains it, the site began with a woman broadcasting live video feeds from four different rooms in her home; then she moved out, leaving the cameras in place. The new tenant, a seriously weird dude the friends nickname "Havoc," apparently has no idea that his personal life is being broadcast all over the Internet. He sleeps in a bat-cage, frequently dons a gas mask, and seems to be making more than a few bombs. The question our characters face is whether or not what they are seeing is actually real and, if so, what - if anything - they should do about it. All of that just serves to set up the real meat of the story, though - and I'm not going to give anything away as far as that is concerned.

Some people are going to give up on this movie before it delivers its impressive payload. The characters are rather pathetic, uninteresting, and downright depressing, making it hard to care what might happen to any of them. You may think you're watching the worst movie ever made, but I'm telling you to hang in there. When the you-know-what hits the fan, you're going to want to be there. Four Boxes - made for a mere forty thousand dollars, is billed as "part thriller, part dark comedy, part social satire" - and, in the end, it is all of that and more.

I certainly didn't suspect such a rookie-like ending from John Carpenter, and I have to say that those final moments take something away from an already somewhat weak storyline leading up to it. Perhaps all those years away from directing feature-length films has left Carpenter a little rusty; even apart from the droll predictability of the ending, The Ward just doesn't strike me as the work of a master director. The film succeeds in drawing you into the story, but you never truly bond with the characters and there is very little in the way of real suspense or horror. Carpenter is seemingly content to keep reaching his hand into the same old bag of tricks that every other Hollywood horror director has relied upon for years and years. The Ward isn't a bad film, but it's certainly a disappointing John Carpenter film - derivative, much too predictable, and far too reliant on scare tactics that stopped being scary in the 1980s.

We don't know much about Kristen (Amber Heard) when she is first brought to North Bend Psychiatric Hospital. She's bruised and battered and wearing nothing but a slip - just the way police found her after she burned down a farmhouse for reasons even she can't explain. Even though she doesn't remember anything before the fire, the whole amnesia thing doesn't seem to bother her a bit, though -- she is far too concerned with escaping from the psych ward. I can't say I blame her, really - what with some spooky and hideous looking girl roaming the halls at night and stealing her blanket from her locked room. On the other hand, the place isn't all that bad for a psych ward, especially given the fact that there are only four other girls in the entire ward, none of whom are the drooling zombie type roaming the less restricted halls. Apparently, Kristen and the other girls are part of some experiment on the part of Dr. Stringer (Jared Harris). Iris (Lyndsy Fonseca) is a talented sketch artist; Sarah's (Danielle Panabaker) only fault seems to be the type of self-conceit that goes along with being beautiful; Zoey (Laura-Leigh) has the intellect of a child; only Emily (Meryl Streep's daughter Mamie Gummer) demonstrates the type of behavior that would typically be considered crazy. A rebel at heart, Kristen proves a rather trying patient for Dr. Springer, Nurse Lundt, and the orderlies, attempting to escape on multiple occasions. She tries to tell them that there's a ghost on the ward who is trying to kill her, but of course they don't believe her. Things only get worse when the other girls begin disappearing.

If this sounds a lot like your run-of-the-mill Hollywood horror plot, that's because that is exactly what it is. There is nothing her that any horror fan hasn't already seen before - probably in more effective films than this one. Here and there, Carpenter manages to generate a slight amount of tension and suspense, but these moments are fleeting - and there are no chills to be had from the sudden appearance of the ghost in any situation. Truth be told, Carpenter even fails to generate an atmosphere appropriate for any mental health ward - haunted or not. His over-reliance on character stereotypes and utterly predictable plot twists make this a most uninspired effort. Even a much less renowned director could have phoned this one in and achieved similar results.