The Ruins (2008)
Average Rating: 5.3/10
Reviews Counted: 92
Fresh: 44 | Rotten: 48
Despite a solid cast and truly frightening source material, The Ruins founders, thanks to a weak script and an excess of gore.
Average Rating: 4.8/10
Critic Reviews: 15
Fresh: 5 | Rotten: 10
Despite a solid cast and truly frightening source material, The Ruins founders, thanks to a weak script and an excess of gore.
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Average Rating: 2.4/5
User Ratings: 512,577
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Movie Info
Based on the novel by A Simple Plan author Scott Smith, director Carter B. Smith's Yucatan-set thriller follows four American tourists as they unwisely venture off the beaten path while vacationing in Cancun. When a friendly German tourist implores the Americans to help search the jungle for his missing brother, the group becomes hopelessly trapped in a nightmare scenario that seems too strange to be true. Jonathan Tucker, Laura Ramsey, Jena Malone, and Shawn Ashmore star. ~ Jason Buchanan, Rovi
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Cast
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Jonathan Tucker
Jeff -
Jena Malone
Amy -
Shawn Ashmore
Eric -
Laura Ramsey
Stacy -
Joe Anderson
Mathias -
Dimitri Baveas
Dimitri -
Sergio Calderón
Lead Mayan
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The Ruins Trailer & Photos
All Critics (95) | Top Critics (15) | Fresh (47) | Rotten (52) | DVD (28)
A more than satisfactory scare fest.
Top CriticMoral of the story: never visit an out-of-the-way Mexican ruin covered by vines and blood-red flowers that make a squeaking sound.
The Ruins does what a good psychological horror movie should do: rely on tension rather than gore to achieve its aims.
The usual gore-and-gristle fare, but this one serves it up with a tad more suggestiveness and smarts.
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.
The 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.
If you fancy a goofy little thrill that's a ray of sunshine compared to the usual glut of gloomy slasher flicks and tawdry torture pornos, The Ruins is just what the doctor ordered.
Tourists vs. flesh-eating vines; guess who wins?
Watchable killer-plant horror movie.
Who really needs to see some guy slice into a woman's lower back, dig around in there with his fingers, and then reel in a four-foot length of tapewormlike vine? I mean, really.
So bereft of creativity that it fails even to deliver to its base--teenage boys--the ghouls and boobs they so desperately want to see.
If it could happen to these kids, smart and beautiful, then it sure as shit is going to happen to me.
Tenso, bem montado e dirigido com segurança e inteligência por Carter (que também extrai boas atuações de seu pequeno elenco), o filme consegue o impossível: transformar plantas assassinas em algo assustador.
Smith's singularly bizarre novel managed what this film cannot: fear and sympathy.
It had me squirming, and the sheer anarchy and amoral chaos involved was refreshing.
Audience Reviews for The Ruins
Super Reviewer
Super Reviewer
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- Stacy: [hurrying to catch the bus] Jeff is going to be pissed if we miss it.
- Eric: Oh, the terrible wrath of Jeff, followed by I'm sure the more frightening whining of Amy.
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- Amy: We're being quarantined here. We're being kept here to die.
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Foreign Titles
- Les Ruines (FR)
