EPA, I Need Your Help with The Ruins

So I created a post a long time ago (one of my lesser known posts) on trying to defend the movie The Ruins, which I saw in the theater. I ended up reviewing the movie rather then defending it. I did a little bit of research and found out that The Ruins was a moderate success at the box office and from what I saw on Twitter and Facebook, a lot of people were not fans of this movie… or they just didn’t like, rather than hating it. My opinion on it is this: it was a really good movie, with some freaky moments in it, brutal and disgusting and it was an overall a good survival flick. But, I want people to give this movie a chance one more time.

1. Apparently some people didn’t like the pompous American attitude the characters had in the beginning. Honestly, it’s not as bad as Hostel and it does bring up something that I am sure a lot of American tourists think about when they are vacationing in foreign places. It also brings up a good point about missing college students in sub-tropical places, which is what this movie is.

2. A lot of people made the point that none of the teens decided to fight the vines back or use the torches to burn the vines. Well, that’s just common sense why they didn’t. If you are encased in a large closed space with thousands of plants and you burn them… it’s like trapping yourself and putting yourself into an oven. If they burned them on the outside, you’re on a burning building. NOT SAFE!! Also, how are you going to fight off thousands of vines?

3. Some have said that The Ruins is a rip-off of Turistas and The Descent. I don’t think that it was a rip-off at all but rather inspired by. If that’s the case… The Descent was a rip-off of The Cave. I was not convinced that Turistas was that good of a movie but more of a thriller rather than a horror.

4. They say the American tourists are stupid and idiotic for trusting a seemingly nice German man. Well, look at the news and tell me that when teens are drunk or having a lot of fun they do anything and even sober… teens do stupid things, which gets them in trouble. Most college kids that go on summer vacation end up making stupid decisions and this movie reflects that. It’s not the plot that’s stupid; it’s just telling what really happens.

5. Most people wanted explanation in this movie; mainly, why do killer plants inhabit these ruins? We are so pampered today, when it comes to horror that we want explanation for everything! Because of this, we have the remakes of Halloween and Halloween II that try to explain Micheal's past. There is a saying that the less we know, the scarier it is. People need to understand that not everything has an explanation and this movie was from the tourist point of view… I don’t think they knew why it had killer plants.

6. I read that some people hated this because it had unnecessary amounts of gore. WHAT? UNNECESSARY AMOUNTS OF GORE? This is a survival movie! What are you expecting in a survival movie? If you want “unnecessary amounts of gore” then look at House of the Dead or House of 1,000 Corpses or even Dead Alive!

7. The biggest thing that this movie was chopped down for and was shat on and spat on was the concept of killer plants that eat people! Are you kidding me? I guess we are forgetting classics like The Guardian, or The Thing From Another World, or The Evil Dead? What separates those movies from The Ruins other than they are brief and not feature length? The Ruins brings a good book to the big screen and has some thrilling moments in it as well as great plant effects. Also, people say that the “ringing flowers” was stupid and silly. I don’t think it’s silly. Plants are smart and living things; they have scents to attract bugs so that they can eat them, there are vines that grow on dead animals to suck the water out of them and plants and trees communicate through pheromones. So, ringing flowers may be far fetched but certainly possible… 1,000 of species of plants are found a year!

Now, I won’t be able to change the minds of those who hate this movie with a passion but I do hope to shed some light on this movie and to try to defend it for what it is… one of the best horror movies of 2008 and a great adaptation to a great book. I know for a fact that if these plants existed in real life, EPA would have a field day with them so please, EPA, help me defend these plants! PLEASE!!!