The Ruins

reviewed by Sam Osborn

Attractive, American, and reasonably dumb, four upperclassmen college students are spending a week’s vacation hitting the sands and margaritas of Mexico. They’re a couple of couples, best friends Amy and Stacy (Jena Malone and Laura Ramsey) with their boyfriends, Jeff and Eric (Jonathan Tucker and Shawn Ashmore). The four decide to spend their last day wearing more than bikinis to follow their new German friend, Mathias (Joe Anderson), out to an archeological Mayan dig site. A bus, a taxi, and a four mile hike later, they emerge from the jungles whiny and amazed, standing before an enormous, ancient pyramid. But out from the jungle pounce the natives wielding bows and revolvers, chasing the Americans to the top of their pyramid and quarantining them to the evils that hide within their ruins.

The film rights to Scott B. Smith’s novel, The Ruins, were optioned before even it was released. Such a pre-sale makes us wonder whether anybody bothered to read the book before greenlighting it as a Hollywood project. It’s a fine read—odd and original in its terse, suspiciously script-like prose—but maybe not the stuff of mulitplexes and popcorn.

The evil lurking within the pyramid actually turns out to be some carnivorous plant life. And though gardening is certainly a hobby that strikes fear into my own heart, it’s maybe not what we’d expect from a monster at the movies. These vines don’t jump or bite. They don’t leap out of the dark or wield knives. They instead creep (grow?) towards you in your sleep, burrowing and twisting about your skin, ravaging your body from the inside out.

Such is the case when Stacy, the busty, more rational blonde, wakes to find a vine has grown through her shin. Still trapped atop the pyramid, the group now realizes the reason for their quarantine. Infection from the vine is inevitable, and their escape unlikely.

Though casting for the roles of “four moderately resourceful Americans to be devoured by evil plant” could have fallen toward the wayside of physical appearance and gratuitous nudity, Director Carter Smith and his Casting Director made some inspired decisions in whom they chose to be botanically eaten. Jonathan Tucker—most notably remembered as the lead in NBC’s ill-fated serial drama “The Black Donnellys”—plays a fervent, sensitive med student (emphasis on the word “student”), making decisions to amputate limbs and perform impromptu surgery with a hunting knife. Jena Malone as Amy, his girlfriend, reacts believably, if obnoxiously, to these gruesome undertakings, whining even as her friend Stacy contorts into a psychotic, bleeding mess.

The gore sprayed and dripped and pooled with these surgical scenes is the usual–and annoying–preoccupation of The Ruins. Meant to work as a reaction to the psychological stress enacted by the infected Stacy, the scenes instead work mostly in cringe factor. Mr. Smith tries his best to mount unease over his gangly, flowered vines, but is repeatedly forced to resort to gore for his scares. The slow and psychological defeat of a group of humans to a plant is not right scratch for our horror film itch. It may have worked on the page, where the inner workings of a character can be sketched and arched high over many chapters, but on celluloid it’s just a wiggling bush and some amputated legs.

The Ruins: Directed by Carter Smith. Screenplay by Scott B. Smith (based on his novel). Starring Jena Malone, Jonathan Tucker, Shawn Ashmore, Laura Ramsey. Rated R.