Cynical Cinema

The biggest problem with The Ruins is that it tries to be something it’s not. And by that I mean - it tries to be something new. And it isn’t. You see there are four hot college kids…stop me if you’ve heard this before…who go on a vacation to a foreign country…still with me?…and decide to check out an area off the beaten track that isn’t on the maps or the tourist brochures…is it different yet? Is it new? No? OK, how about this - there are plants. That kill people! Which is a little different. I guess. But the plants are not used for the scares. In fact, nothing is really used to scare us. And it’s supposed to be a horror movie. This supposed horror movie comes out July 8th, from Paramount Home Entertainment.

The thing is - the plants could actually BE scary if they were used well. The plants are able to imitate people, and cell phone rings, in order to lure people to their doom. This could be scary, or at least interesting. But this takes up about four minutes of the 93 minute running time. So the rest of the time we have the standard hot-teen-in-a-foreign-country horror cliches. Like, the fact that each of the hot kids takes turns being the sane one while everyone around is losing their minds. And the standard, gratuitous boob shot. The boob shot wouldn’t have made sense later on in the film, so they get it out of the way in a totally gratuitous way as early as possible. Then the cheesy, ridiculous lines that are supposed to be prescient - “four Americans on vacation don’t just disappear!” Come ON!

Then, of course, the torture-porn. The one kid, you see, is studying to be a doctor. So he knows when legs need to be amputated. Which is a great excuse for some seriously disgusting, over-the-top gory detail, which proves to be useless anyway, and certainly not scary. So, where does the “horror” come from? It isn’t the plants, because although they’re the villains, they’re underused. It doesn’t come from the gory gross useless flesh-cutting. And it doesn’t come from the people, who are just annoying. The best they can do are some vaguely creepy medical explanations from the vaguely creepy wannabe-doctor guy. So - there are no scares. And no scares in a horror movie makes for a bad horror movie. And The Ruins is certainly a bad horror movie.