3 out of 5

Director: Carter Smith

The Ruins is a tough movie. Amazing production design, excellent capturing of scenes, a perfectly understated score and a well-chosen, easily identifiable cast all work together… to, for some reason, average effect. It’s a simple enough set up – a group of teens vacationing in Mexico follow a new acquaintance on a trip to some Mayan ruins to search for said acquaintance’s brother. …And the ruins end up having a man-eating plant growing all over it, and for various plot reasons, now our characters are stuck there. Here the film starts to feel different. The horror basis is there – one by one people die, there’s a lot of gore and yelling – but teen horror deaths are generally senseless. This feels more noirish, where bad decisions just pile onto bad decisions and the terror comes from helplessness and strained humanity… Director Carter Smith is apparently a photographer, and it shows. His decision to use practical sets and practical special effects really grounds all of this, as does his eye for capturing the juxtaposition between the beating sun, the beauty of the surroundings and the grime and sweat and blood being splattered all over. Also, as with the book, these characters are very real. Almost predictably so, which is maybe part of the problem, but they feel more sensible and grounded than the majority of horror fodder. The problem, methinks, is in the pacing. The movie cuts a lot of the inbetween moments out of the book… which isn’t bad… the book is sort of slow because of these… but it cuts too much. If you were to start watching the movie once they were on the hill, thinking there had been an introduction to events, this would seem like an amazingly terrifying film. But oddly, watching it in one sitting makes it seem too rushed. It’s a great concept, very well done, and the effects WILL make you squirm. Ugh. But finding the right pacing for the script could’ve ratcheted this up to unforgettable.