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75A surprisingly effective little horror nightmare.
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75In order to appreciate The Ruins, one has to be a die-hard fan of horror or bloody thrillers. Those in that category will discover that The Ruins delivers the goods.
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70First-time feature director Carter Smith, working with resourceful cinematographer Darius Khondji, pulls off the neat trick of using the wide screen to claustrophobic effect. And the actors give such a convincing display of starvation-fueled fear that they deserve their own private craft-service table.
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63The Ruins is, with one major caveat, about as good an adaptation of Scott Smith's bestselling novel as Hollywood was ever going to make.
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50In the end, the gimmick is too risible and its effects on the characters too forced to sustain either suspense or horror.
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50Smith has changed a few plot points around to keep readers who already know the secret of the ruins guessing, and to some extent the strategy works. There was, however, no reason whatsoever to change the book's perfect endings.
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The characters never evolve past mere functionality, and the adherence to certain tried-and-true horror tropes -- the good girl who doesn't want to go but does, the generic naughty kids who get it first -- feels workmanlike, robbing the story of any real suspense or surprise.
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50Director Carter Smith suffers from another, more common problem: In trying to squeeze every plot point from the book into a 90-minute movie, he failed to capture its chilling essence.
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42The Ruins is lumpish, static, and obvious. It's a gringos-go-home cautionary fright flick done in the spirit of a cheap '50s horror movie, except that it leaves you longing for the competence of grade-Z studio-system trash.
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40There are a handful of intense sequences and a few scenes of squirm-inducing gore in The Ruins, but not much else.
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40Slick, sick stuff, but save the odd squirm, a killer-plant horror that doesn't grow anywhere.
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More disgusting than scary, The Ruins is the latest in a long line of horror films about upper-middle-class travelers being terrorized in unfamiliar environments.
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40Ultimately less dependent on suspense or even scares than on squirm-inducing grossouts, this tale of Yank hardbodies vs. carnivorous creepers should flower briefly in hardtops, then spread like an invasive weed in ancillary.
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38The movie doesn't do anything with these viney bastards. There's no back story, no satire, no allegory, no implications beyond what's happening on the pyramid.
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20As it stands, The Ruins is about as interesting as a pile of old stones and a monkey-dumb yanqui falling prey to the horrors of globalization. And that's pretty dumb.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 11 out of 21
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Mixed: 2 out of 21
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Negative: 8 out of 21
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GrantZ10
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Mike2A very silly, laughable movie. And this was suppose to be a horror?!?