Twice a year, you’re supposed to spread pre-emergent fertilizer on your lawn to prevent weeds from ever popping up. Someone should have done the same to THE RUINS, a terrible killer-vines horror flick based upon Scott Smith’s not-at-all-terrible 2006 book of the same name.
Two couples of college kids vacationing in Mexico meet a charismatic German guy who needs help finding his brother, from whom he’s heard no word since venturing out on a trip to check out some ancient ruins in the nearby jungle. Somehow, this seems like a viable alternative to another day of drinking and doing it, so our quartet of all-American students agrees to help the complete stranger out.
Bad move. No sooner do they arrive on the site — which looks like a stair-step stone temple — than locals speaking a foreign tongue shoot one of their new friend’s friends, via an arrow to the heart and a bullet through the nose. This drives our imperiled heroes and heroines to the top of the site, where they’re imprisoned by the growing armed throng below.
Then there’s also the matter of the ruins’ plant life: It’s, like, alive, dude. And it eats people by burrowing into their skin and moving around. With precious little food or water and seemingly no hope to get through the human gauntlet below, the collegians’ future doesn’t look so rosy.
It’s hard to fathom why THE RUINS is as bad as it is, because the talented Smith is also responsible for the screenplay. (He also pulled double duty on A SIMPLE PLAN, and both novel and film turned out splendid.) It follows his book rather closely, with a strange exception of letting things that happened to one character in print happen to another on film, and allowing one character who expired early on now survive to the end, while giving another the vice-versa treatment.
Your first clue at its quality is how ugly and cheap it looks, with the exception of a pair of beautiful location shots on the beach. Director Carter Smith makes his feature debut, having previously helmed a gay-themed dramatic short. How that qualifies someone for a big-studio thriller is beyond me.
Worse, it’s simply boring, which is weird, because what played out as gripping over 336 pages seems an absolutely tedious uphill climb at just 93 minutes, credits included. Part of the reason may be we’re given no insight into who the characters are, so we don’t really care about what happens to them. We know they like to pound back the booze, and that’s about it. All of them are like ciphers. The one thing the movie does better than the book is allow us to keep track of who’s who, but that’s only because of the visuals.
If anything, THE RUINS movie deserves a bravery badge for not diluting the shock moments of Smith’s original novel. Having missed this in the theaters (and now I’m glad I ditched the free screening), I’m unsure how this “unrated” DVD compares to what moviegoers saw, but it contains some sickening graphic scenes, most notably of an impromptu double amputation in grisly detail.
But it chickens out of presenting the book’s chilling ending, going for one of those insipid Hollywood “gotcha” moments — the cinematic equivalent to a middle finger hoisted toward the audience. (The alternate ending’s just as bad — yet another one that unimaginatively rips off CARRIE.) Don’t “ruin” your night with a rental. —Rod Lott
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
I kind of enjoyed the movie, but then I was specifically in the mood for a mindless horror flick. I really do want to read the book, however, and just need to find a good opportunity to move it from wishlist to cart…
I ended up employing the 100-Page Rule on the book. The plot was just starting to get good by pg. 100, but the characters were pretty much like you described the movie versions. We were given some insight into who they are, but I just didn’t like any of them or care about what happened to them.