Director: Carter Smith
Writer: Scott B. Smith
Producers: Chris Bender, Stuart Cornfeld, Jeremy Kramer, Ben Stiller
Starring: Jonathan Tucker, Jena Malone, Shawn Ashmore, Laura Ramsey, Joe Anderson
MPAA Rating: R
Running time: 91 min

Horror movies seem to be a dime a dozen but very few actually manage to scare. The last of the bunch to offer up real armrest holding intensity was Neil Marshall’s The Descent and unless you’re into tracking down foreign horror, chances are it’s been a few years since you’ve seen anything out of Hollywood worth your weight in blood. The Ruins is not the best of the last few years and I hesitate to say it’ll the best this year but truth is that it will be the best horror film Hollywood is likely to churn out in the next eight months.

Adapted by Scott B. Smith from his novel, the story follows four American college students on holidays in Mexico. The group has spent their holidays beach and pool side until a chance encounter with a Dutch tourist who invites the quartet to join him on a trip to an off-the-map Mayan pyramid. Enticed by the remote non-touristy attraction, the group sets off for adventure only to find themselves kept on the temple by a local tribe who threatens them with death. What the group will eventually discover is that death at the hands of the locals is bound to be less painful than the events that will unfold.

The Ruins follows horror film convention fairly closely. Good looking leads, gore, lots of screaming and blood, but what it manages to do well is create a genuinely thrilling experience mostly because the script and the film maker, director Carter Smith in his feature film debut, keep the audience in the dark. From the excellent opening scene we know things are going to go wrong but it’s nearly 30 minutes before we find out what’s out there to be scared of and once we do find out, it’s amazing how quickly the viewer looks beyond the supernatural (and somewhat laughable) aspect at play and falls back in line with the horror the group is experiencing. Kudos to Smith for managing to open the film in such a way that the banter before the horror doesn’t feel like it drags and rather surprisingly, he even manages to create a sense of dread and terror which keeps the audience captivated though the 90 minute running time.

One of the reasons the film works so well is due, in large part, to the casting. “It” girl Laura Ramsey is a bit over the top with her performance but she’s also asked to essentially lose her mind and the pairing works. Shawn Ashmore (Iceman of X-Men fame) is her boyfriend and just sort of there. Jena Malone is great though grievously underused while her boyfriend, played by teen horror movie regular Jonathan Tucker manages the best performance I’ve ever seen from him as the level headed leader of the group. He’s a bit too serious for his own good but his graveness works within the context of the film. By far the best of the bunch is Joe Anderson, who some may remember from Across the Universe, as the Dutch tourist that gets them into the whole mess to begin with. Anderson works on multiple levels in that he looks, and we are lead to believe he is, in on the terror but once things start to unfold, we come to realize he’s as clueless as the Americans.

I won’t kid you with praise of The Ruins being a fantastic horror film but it’s solid and better than your run of the mill teen-centric horror. Smith doesn’t shy away from the gore and there’s plenty of blood for those who are looking for it but along the way, he manages to create a real sense of thrill and surprise. The film ends badly, mostly because it closes how you’d expect it to, but it’s not sour enough to detract from the previous 89 minutes and as a whole, The Ruins is a solid, if conventional, horror film.

Links:
IMDb profile
Official Site
Flixster Profile for The Ruins