Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on April 4, 2008, and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
I should open this review by noting that I haven’t read the best-selling Scott Smith novel upon which The Ruins is based, so I’m not in a position to judge the faithfulness of its screen adaptation (which Smith himself scripted). Nor can I judge if any complexities were lost in the author’s paring down of his 300-plus-page (or 500-plus, if you’re looking at the paperback) narrative for this 90-minute movie. What I can say is that, assessed on its own merits, the film is a taut and solid hour and a half of good old-fashioned chills and thrills. Why DreamWorks and Paramount decided to tar it with the no-critics’-screenings brush is a mystery; did they perhaps believe that “respectable” critics would be prejudiced walking into a movie about man-eating plants?
It’s actually one of the movie’s qualities that its deadly vines, while an integral part of the storyline, largely lurk around the sidelines while the meat of the drama is enacted by its four human protagonists. Best friends Amy (Jena Malone) and Stacy (Laura Ramsey) and their respective boyfriends Jeff (Jonathan Tucker) and Eric (Shawn Ashmore) are first seen slacking around a pool at the tail end of a Mexican vacation, when they’re approached by German tourist Mathias (Joe Anderson). Anxious to find his absent brother, he requests and receives the quartet’s company in traveling out to some ancient Mayan ruins, where his bro was last seen headed with a pretty archaeologist.
A pickup-truck-taxi ride into the jungle and a couple of ignored warning signs later, the Americans, Mathias and fellow traveler Dimitri (Dimitri Baveas) arrive at the remote, spectacular site, a flat-topped pyramid with steps carved up each side—and infested with the creeping vegetation. When a group of well-armed Mayans arrive and refuse to let them leave, the group has no choice but to hike to the summit and attempt to get a cell-phone signal. It’s no surprise when they can’t…but then they’re surprised to hear a phone ringing from the depths of a dry well dug directly down the pyramid’s center. They have no choice but to attempt to retrieve it, and things proceed from bad to worse to really, seriously worse, for reasons having largely but not entirely to do with the fact that the vines are sentient, and severely infectious.
While its characterizations aren’t particularly deep in the establishing scenes, The Ruins is the kind of movie in which the people are defined by their reactions to the increasingly stressful and horrifying events that befall them. The opening reel or so drop just enough hints and incidents to allow for payoffs later when the pals find themselves under intense pressure, and slowly but surely turn on each other as they struggle to survive. Inevitably, their decisions sometimes seem a tad implausible (one character goes barefoot at a crucial moment when footwear would seem a much wiser option), but their actions generally play as credible under the ever-more-desperate circumstances. All four leads are naturalistic and likable at the start, and their psychological breakdowns are equally persuasive—particularly that of Ramsey, whose Stacy physically suffers the most.
The vines are quite convincing too, expertly brought to life by the visual and physical FX teams. Yet they aren’t played as monsters with overwhelming supernatural abilities, but rather as advanced plant life that has evolved just enough to trick and trap human prey. (There’s a great audience-reaction moment when one of their particular abilities is revealed—and is it a visual joke that the youthful hedonists are victimized by what look like marijuana plants on steroids?) Director Carter Smith reveals their extra mobility gradually, as tendrils crawl here and there at the edges of the frame, before eventually staging a hair-raiser of a setpiece deep in the pyramid’s interior. Kudos too to makeup FX supervisor Jason Baird, who created an assortment of extremely nasty wounds and the most squirm-worthy lower-leg abuse since Misery.
The rest of the behind-the-scenes contributions are equally first-rate, including Grant Major’s production design, Graeme Revell’s score and the cinematography by Darius Khondji, that master of darkness from Se7en and Panic Room who here changes pace to help Smith stage his horrors primarily in the sunlight. Throughout the film, Smith—displaying remarkable confidence in his feature debut, following his acclaimed short Bugcrush—rarely strains for effect, adopting an effectively matter-of-fact tone that nonetheless doesn’t flinch from the visceral mayhem and fraying emotions. He’s a genuine and skilled craftsman of fear, and the genre could use more like him.
In the midst of a big-screen horror scene in which both sanitized, J-horror-inflected spookery and extreme bloodletting have descended into redundancy, The Ruins is something of a breath of fresh air. It’s an unpretentious, back-to-basics and extremely polished production that delivers the first real frights of this movie year, and doesn’t subjugate its goals to pushing a no-longer-existent envelope or showing off the latest editing tricks. I can’t say how fans of the book will react, but from its start to its satisfying finish, The Ruins should leave most any fan of cinematic fear with a smile on their face and a chill up their spine.
