Review - The Ruins (2008)

I will be honest and state that when I went into go see this movie, I had low expectations and I prepared myself to walk out of the theater in utter disgust, but surprisingly that wasn't the case. It was probably one of the best movies of the 'killer plants' subgenre that I have ever seen. This movie has some pretty intense horror scenes as well as primitive surgery; it has some top-notch acting and a very out of the ordinary plot line to drive it.

From Blogger Pictures

To begin, this movie had a great amount of gore and horror to it, which I did not expect to any stretch of the imagination. The gore in this movie should mostly be attributed to the primitive surgeries that the kids had to resort to in order to rid themselves of the deadly plant worms. In one scene, they had to break, cut off and cauterize a character's legs. There are many scenes that involved skin removal and vines growing into people's body. I honestly did not expect any of this to be in the movie. As for the horror, you'd think that flowers that can imitate a cell phone ring would be campy, but they manage to scare you by tricking you into believing it would be funny scene. I think that most of the actual 'jump out scares' are within the temple and involve the creeping vines but as far as that, the only thing that is scary is the repulsive the med-school surgery.



The acting in the movie was outstanding and seemed as though it was natural dialogue. I think that the two most notable and, for me, the most memorable is the performance by Jonathan Tucker and Laura Ramsey 



 

From Blogger Pictures

There have been many movies that have revolved around killer plants (Creepshow 2, The Double Garden and The Land Unknown). However, what they all have in common is that the plants are just plants and they are not intelligent. The one horror/musical that comes to mind that has a smart plant is "Little Shop of Horrors." The plants in this movie have flows, that if they vibrate in a certain way their pedals and ovary resemble a sound close to a cell phone ring or whispering. It sounds cheesy and stupid, but it's not. The story focus a lot on the plants, but it also focuses on the paranoia that the kids have as well as their sanity break down. This is effective because then the whole movie does not rely on the plants as their main "scare factor." Overall, I think this movie is going to be one of those films that will be overlooked as just another stupid plant-dumb-teenager-vacationers horror movie when it's not. This is a teenage oriented horror movie so if you like teen slashers or teenage-vacation-gone-wrong movies, you'll love this movie. As for me, I thought it was one of the best-executed adapted stories from a horror novel.