Wake Wood is one of those movies that has stupid people doing all the wrong things and people get slaughtered. A little girl is killed by a rabid dog that is in the care of her veterinarian dad. She's was stupid,opened the door, and entered the cage. Some kids have no sense and they die. Sad, huh. Move on. The parents move to Wake Wood, a small town, where the mom opens a pharmacy and the dad goes to work for Timothy Spall. Mom's still having trouble moving on. dad gets into his work and there are some gorey animal surgery scenes. Yuck! Poor cow. It's one of those towns that looks good on the surface but the town has a secret pet cemetery supernatural trick that revives the dead. There's limit to the magic, the person only returns for three days, then they go back. It requires a ritual and a spare dead body to act as the vessel for the returning person. The person to be revived has to be dead less than a year or there will be consequences. Timothy Spall tells them that. Of course,our couple doesn't give a rip and they lie. Lucky for them a farmer gets crushed by a giant ram soon after they make pact. They get their daughter back but their lie comes back to haunt them ASAP. The cute little girl starts killing critters before moving up to people. The movie is damned slow at first and we were yakkin' for a bit of it. It picks up in the latter half but they still are stupid people that I don't care for. There's nothing much new here but the film looks pretty good. It's a solid middle of the road offering that could be missed and not one that I would need to watch again. There are better movies like it, watch those.
John Carpenter's The Ward was a better film than our previous selection. It's one of those movies that have a secret twist at the end and I won't let the cat out of the bag. Amber Heard, whom I'd seen in Zombieland and Pineapple Express, is found by the cops burning down a farm house. They take her to a mental institution and stick her in a ward with some other girls. There's some interaction between characters as Amber tries to settle in. The doctor is trying to help her, she resists, the nurse is in full on Nurse Ratchet mode and the main orderly is off putting. Amber is disturbed about her lack of memory of her life before the fire. That's a clue. After a bit of hospital life some sort of supernatural beastie starts popping up. We see it in the dark hallway, in a mirror, in the shower. Finally it starts killing and the girls start disappearing. The movie is well shot and mostly entertaining. The actors are doing a good job, the story is clever enough, and we were mostly paying attention, only yakkin' a bit. I'm not sure that I would need to buy one but I'm glad I saw it. We all agreed it would have been better without that one last startle at the end. It's one of those gotchas just to make you jump one last time. I'm tired of those.
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