The Ruin: My Review

Last week I bought a DVD copy of The Ruin, which was helpfully billed as "too extreme for theaters". Maybe it is and maybe it isn't - I don't know what passes for extreme in movie theaters these days - but I can say that the movie wasn't an overt waste of time. It had some extreme moments, and some moments of reasonable creepiness, and in the end plenty of blood and gore. Plus it had trust fund babies suffering inordinately, and who doesn't like that?

The upshot of the story is that four fairly annoying empty-headed Americans on vacation in Mexico decide to stop drinking and having sex long enough to go out into the jungle with a faux German named Mattias to cast eyes upon a "VIP" Mayan ruin. They get there, and are presently surrounded by a large number of people armed with (among other things) bows and arrows and Wyatt Earp's Buntline Special. Seems the Mayan pyramid is covered with man-eating vegetation, and the locals, who grunt and gesticulate like the "Flavormundo" native, force the Americans (und Mattias, ja) to hunker down on the pyramid and die so they won't spread the deadly vegetation.

As someone who has spent an appreciable fraction of my life trying to keep Bermuda grass from invading gardens and flower beds, I can fully grok their thinking in this matter.

Anyway, soon the festering and dying begins, and the Blood Quotient goes up accordingly. Parts of it could actually qualify as squeam-inducing, like when the annoying blonde girl (as opposed to the annoying dark-haired girl) elects to carve upon herself. But this scene also violated a basic rule of common sense, which is that you never approach a crazy person with a knife who is busy hacking off a major thigh muscle. Odds are you're going to get your palm slashed or, worse yet, take the knife right in your aorta... And I did have to give a hearty Oh, no way when they amputated Mattias's legs, which truth be told had already more or less fallen off anyway. I mean, why bother?

It goes for the avant-garde ending by having the dark-haired girl escape even as the deadly vegetation starts to take her over. Next time you select hair shampoo that contains phytochemicals or botanicals, think about evil vegetation that grows under your skin.

But in one respect, the vines are pretty helpful. They never seem to drag living people away, or even sleeping people. But the minute you die, in they come to drag the body away. That's handy, isn't it? Better than having a bunch of stiffs cluttering the movie, especially awkwardly shaped ones like Mattias.

I didn't like any of the characters. The girls were all sluts and the guys were all BMOCs out having a little fun in Mexico, except for Mattias, who was simply not to be believed. And so it didn't much matter to me that they all died; the main reason I watched it was to determine not if they died, but how. So, that's it in a nutshell. A bunch of unappealing characters die in various ways amid a Vegetable Nightmare, with plenty of blood and a certain amount of squeam. If you're a fan of bloody horror movies, you won't be too disappointed. If you're a fan of Fred Astaire, you may want to give it a miss - but you probably already knew that.