The Ruins (2008)

It’s an especially fun movie from a director and cast who are clearly having a good time allowing themselves to let loose.

I am only giving this movie a 1 for the great cast, though I can't imagine what any of them were thinking. This movie was horrible

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

It looked nice. The blacks were crushed and the whites too hot but that seems the style now and it looks fine. I would have rather seen it in high-def due to the lovely landscapes but I'm not that arsed. I liked the sounds actually. The sound effects were convincing and the music was unnoticeable (so it must have done its job). It has the slowest pacing. The most shocking scene is where the guy is shot but that takes place early on and is soon forgotten amongst rather boring plant attacks. To be fair there are some gross bits but it is not enough to stop is being boring. The characters are too annoying and you want them to die. There is no emotional attachment. It reminded me of Hostel (2005) in structure. For a horror film it is not scary. It's not even that gory or anything. It is boring though!

Well, I finally got a chance to experience a film that I had wanted to see, for some obscure reason, ever since it was released in 2008: "The Ruins." This is an Australian/U.S. co-production that, as it turns out, is an extremely effective horror thriller indeed. In it, two young American couples are on vacation at a Mexican resort. They befriend a young German who tells them that he is going to an off-the-maps Mayan ruin the next day in the jungle, with another friend of his, and so, off the six go, on what turns out to be a vacation detour from hell. Once arrived at the pyramid, modern-day Mayans appear with guns and arrows and force them to stay on top of the pyramid; they are prisoners there, and cannot leave. Even worse, the youngsters soon realize that the vines that cover the pyramid, inside and out, are very much alive...and murderous, to boot. These vines can imitate the sounds that humans and cell phones make, and they have a nasty habit of devouring people, sucking out their blood, carrying them off, and crawling down their throats. Their spores, once inhaled, cause the plants to grow inside the human body, as well! What follows is an escalating exercise in horror and suspense that is most assuredly NOT for the squeamish viewer. There are indeed several scenes that are a bit hard to watch. In the first, one of the kids must have his infected legs amputated by the others; in another, one of the women must have her body slashed by a knife so that the plant life within her can be removed. The four leads--Jonathan Tucker, Jena Malone, Laura Ramsey and Shawn Ashmore--are all very effective here, and director Carter Smith does a wonderful job at ratcheting tension. My stomach was in knots by the end of this 90-minute thrill ride, a sure sign of an effective film and a job well done. As one of my reference books, "Horror: 333 Films to Scare You to Death," puts it, "Not since the seedpods of 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers' has chlorophyll been put to such terrifying use." The film comes more than highly recommended by yours truly....

OK I saw this film near when it first came out & it was one you remember. So just come back from Mexico & it brought it back to memory & I decided to watch it again. But I'm shocked to see such a low rating this film is about a 7.5 The story is such a original idea unlike all the constant crap coming out at the minute & none stop remakes. The cast has decent acting & there's.some lovely photography. I knew before I watched it there was some scene that I didn'tlike (goryness) but tthere's actually more than I remember I felt myself nearly throw up a few times.. As for the plot I'm not going to write anything as wouldn't want to spoil it .

Taking a vacation in Mexico, a group of friends arrive at a Mayan temple only to be trapped there by the locals afraid of the vines constantly surrounding the group and must try to find a way out of the situation.This was a highly enjoyable and entertaining affair. One of the better pluses is the fact that there's an incredibly menacing and fearful threat in the film, which are done through the rather creepy vines into a great threat with several really big parts toward them. One of them is that they're literally everywhere in here, covering just about all the surface area possible at the temple and given the reaction that the natives have toward them it makes for a really great threat. Their actions are also worthwhile in making them feared, and those scenes are really well-done here the big with the alive vine wall, which is just utterly creepy and very original as the set-up with the wailing voices coming from the area is nicely handled, the location of being underground in a dank, darkly-lit temple with little to no light provides a ton of atmospherics, and once the twist is revealed about what's actually down there, the whole scene is paid off nicely. The absolute best, though, is the original scene where they find out its powers, snaking out of the shadows to devour and consume fallen parts of a mangled body in front of everybody showing the vines as forces to be reckoned with. This also manages to feature two incredibly brutal scenes that are simply uncomfortable to watch. The first is the leg amputation, which is mainly due to the crudeness of the operation and the visuals and sounds presented make it a really good moment. The other big one where an operation ends up removing vines from several body parts at the same time is also great, as there's the visuals of the vines being removed and wriggling around along with the blood from the wounds, and the endless screaming and brutality make it an extremely uncomfortable scene. That's also the film's other big plus, the blood and gore as this one is quite bloody in its kills and wounds as well as another scene where another victim starts to cut themselves all over the body resulting in a severely bloodied body from head to toe that is quite grotesque-looking. Coupled with a furious pace, this one is a lot of fun since there weren't too many flaws with this one. One of the biggest ones is that there's a distinct inability to have the natives react to the dangers of the vines in completely different ways in similar situations with two key scenes involving characters touching the vines. When one trips and falls into them, despite not knowing what they are, leads the natives into high-pitched yelling and screaming and leading the group up the temple which gives the natives several opportunities to get a shot at killing that one yet nothing occurs. Later, when one of the natives' children merely touches it through absolutely circumstantial means for a shorter amount of time, the child is shot at point blank range without mercy. It's a shocking scene, but flies in the face of their earlier attitude towards the vines. The only other flaw is the failure to explain the history of the vines as there's a crack about animals avoiding it, but nothing else even comes close to explaining them, or what the native's connection with it really is with all the back-stories to this never given and left a mystery. These here are the real flaws to this one.Rated R: Graphic Violence, Graphic Language, Brief Nudity and scene of strong child violence.