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!!!

Respect the Plants

I don’t see why people hated “The Ruins.” I loved it and from what I read it was because of the whole ringing/whispering flowers… c’mon, it wasn’t that cheesy. In fact, it was pretty cool and actually pretty scary. There are flowers out there that imitate sounds and smells to lure prey towards them, so why can’t this be any different? I think that people are bashing this video simply because of that reason when they should be looking at the overall picture and they’ll see it really is a good, gritty movie.

In the famous words of Annie Wilkes:

“That’ll be like junking a Mercedes just because it had a broken spring.”

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.