It's both craftily creepy (in a subtle way) and powerfully visceral (in a kick-ass way), plus it delivers its payload in a slick and efficient 91-minute burst of nastiness.
Comment
04/04/08
The Ruins (2008)
46
%
Tomatometer
How does the Tomatometer work 
Reviews Counted:80
Fresh:37
Rotten:43
Average Rating:5.4/10
Consensus: Despite a solid cast and truly frightening source material, The Ruins founders, thanks to a weak script and an excess of gore.
Theatrical Release:Apr 4, 2008 Wide
Box Office: $17,402,425
Synopsis: Author Scott Smith adapts his own popular 2006 novel in this unsettling and surprising horror yarn. In its first half hour, THE RUINS seems to be cut from the same... [More]
Starring: Jonathan Tucker, Jena Malone, Shawn Ashmore, Laura Ramsey
Director: Carter Smith
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Reviews for The Ruins
Not quite on par with something like The Descent but close enough to not make you feel as if you've been ripped off.
04/04/08
The Ruins offers further proof that what works on the printed page doesn't necessarily work on the big screen.
04/04/08
Squabbling among the skin-deep characters doesn’t induce much sympathy, though thesps do their best.
04/04/08
Top CriticParanoia, spinal injuries, psychic distress, impromptu amputations, self-mutilation -- it’s all in there, convincingly rendered (the first-rate sound design exacerbates every fracture) and finally pointless.
04/04/08
With Scott Smith's rep and a best-selling horror novel, a sexy location and solid young cast, you'd have hoped the studio would find a director with a little more than a Tommy Hilfiger commercial under his belt.
04/04/08
Not even a fixer-upper, The Ruins should be considered a complete tear-down.
04/04/08
Though commentaries on politics, nature and evolution arise, the film doesn’t push them too hard or far as such might detract from the slow building bedlam—which is strikingly satisfying.
04/04/08
To sum up The Ruins, I'll quote one of the characters: "This is so not okay."
04/04/08
The finale of The Ruins makes the film feel like a cheap cop-out … a claim no one would ever make about the novel.
04/04/08
At once silly, gross and boring...aims to be something more than a generic vacationing-twentysomethings-in-peril movie, [but] its pretensions make it even more ludicrous.
04/04/08
The Ruins is one of the creepiest, most disturbing tales to hit theaters in months. If there is a film that is guaranteed to make your skin crawl, this one is it.
04/04/08
The shift from averting your eyes from the gore to rolling your eyes at the stupid dialogue is enough to give you a headache.
04/04/08
The tourists' fears have infected their very beings, and their decisions are increasingly ineffective precisely because they are based on fear and ignorance.
04/04/08
...like "Touristas" with a better cast, higher production values and a supernatural edge...hits all the novel's outer horror touch points, but director Carter Smith doesn't let them build so much as check them off a list that he's rushing through
04/04/08
It may not be as fundamentally unsettling as the book was, but it's not a bad horror flick.
04/04/08
The characters are so one-note and unlikable that most viewers will find themselves looking forward to their grisly demises because it means that they won't be annoying us anymore.
04/04/08
Near-perfect at manipulating its audience...it's a marvelous nightmare machine.
04/04/08
The lack of explanations in The Ruins may prove unsatisfying to some, but the unknown is often more terrifying than the tangible. Such are the wages of fear.
04/04/08
Letting it get under your skin doesn't sound so bad once it gets inside your head.
04/03/08
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