Based on a book by the same guy that wrote A Simple Plan, The Ruins is a film about stupid young people, doing stupid things in a ridiculous situation. In other words: a typical horror movie. The true surprise is how effective the movie can be at times and how that sort of evens out the fact that the sacrificees aren’t the sharpest knives in the drawer. Frankly, there’s nothing I hate more when something is just about half good and half bad equally. And unfortunately this is one of those cases where you can blame the screenwriter for straying far from the source because in this instance the guy writing the movie and novel are one and the same.
Four friends are on a Mexican resort vacation: Jeff (Jonathan Tucker), Amy (Jena Malone), Eric (Shawn Ashmore) and Stacy (Laura Ramsey). Somewhere between all the drinking and whoring, they meet a German kid named Mathias (Joe Anderson) whose brother is working on an excavation at a nearby ancient Mayan temple. The temple is off the beaten path (meaning: out in the middle of no where) and no sooner do the kids get there then the locals pop up and threaten the gang with death if they try to leave the temple ground. Small price to pay in order to keep them on the temple ground in order to be fed to the cannibalistic plants that live there.
The Ruins is a logical extension of Hostel and Turistas; one is about tourists being tortured for sport, the other is about torturing tourists for profit. Finally, we get a movie about the ways that rude natives torture unsuspecting American tourists for altruistic reasons. I guess you could also read it as a vegetarian parable – the plants bite back, like a less comedic and less musical Little Shop of Horrors but with more dismemberment.
Mostly though, The Ruins just kind of reinforces all those awful stereotypes about native peoples in foreign lands and how they treat hapless Westerners like chattel. Their cold, their cruel, they show no sign of being able to comprehend Spanish, let alone English. At times like these, I think of the immortal words of Frank Burns: “I speak American and I can go anywhere in the world I want.”
The natives of Ruins’ Mexico (really Australia, for some reason Mexico was too expensive, I guess) are barbaric in the same sense that the Spanish conquistadors meant it when they arrived there in the 16th century. On the other side, the two tourist characters that get crapped on the most are the German guy and his friend the Greek who gets unceremoniously dispatched right off.
The other confounding thing is that in all the years the man-eating plant that can mimic human noise has been planted at the pyramid, no one’s thought to go down there with a blow-torch, some pesticide or some napalm. Really? Hundreds of plant species are forced into extinction everyday through deforestation, but we can’t get rid of this? I guess these are the concessions we make when we walk into a horror movie, reality is often at a premium as these things go.
As for the actors, what can you say about people who make you root for the killer vine (pun intended)? The gang from Ruins redefine stupidity in horror, not to mention the whiny, self-absorbed, nearly ugly American. They’re not even stranded for a couple of hours before they start turning on each other. And asking them to do simple things like rationing or having the lightest person descend into the temple with a tourniquet to save a guy’s life? Fuhgeddaboudit. The only thing that everyone seems to be able to agree on is that the guy in pre-med is in charge no matter how dumb his ideas may be. It’s like Lost for Dummies.
And if sitting through an hour of this prattle weren’t bad enough, the movie just really starts getting going when it ends. It seems like this cut is only the first two acts of the movie and there were some other things that were supposed to happen before the credits rolled. Fortunately director Carter Smith knows how to make you jump, and in an act of supreme irony, while you may not care about the plant food, but Smith does a bang up job getting to react to something other than their appalling attitudes.
What do you call a well-crafted film that you find engaging despite the fact that you could care less about whether the main characters live or die? You call it The Ruins, of course.
