The Ruins Reviews
April 9, 2008
A bottle of Roundup would be worth a lot of money in this particular locale. Too bad there's no equivalent product for use on movies like this.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1/5
April 8, 2008
There's really nothing in the film of any entertainment value, not even the inadvertent sort.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/10
April 8, 2008
Smith directs the movie in a completely rudimentary fashion, straight out of Horror 101.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
April 8, 2008
Drained of any of the suspense that distinguished the novel.
April 8, 2008
There are a handful of intense sequences and a few scenes of squirm-inducing gore in The Ruins, but not much else. The film is based on Scott Smith's excellent book, but does little to capture the novel's sense of terror and hopelessness.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
April 7, 2008
If you've read The Ruins, you can probably guess there will come a point at which the movie succumbs to silliness. And sure enough, that moment arrives...
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
April 7, 2008
A visit to some ruins, ruins a Mexico holiday for two couples
Full Review
| Original Score: 5/10
April 7, 2008
Whether the result of angry test audiences who don't like downbeat denouements, or just another misguided 'improvement,' the new finale undoes the book's sense of terrible inexorability and relegates a promising premise to just another bloody horror movie
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
April 7, 2008
Moral of the story: never visit an out-of-the-way Mexican ruin covered by vines and blood-red flowers that make a squeaking sound.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1.5/4
April 7, 2008
In compressing the novel down to a sloppy abridgement, the film fails to capture the eerie portent of its setting.
Original Score: C
April 7, 2008
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.
Original Score: 2/5
April 7, 2008
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.
Full Review
| Original Score: C-
April 7, 2008
When you've got cute young tourists, an exotic locale (well, sort of: Mexico), ancient Mayan hoodoo and surly peasants with machetes, you expect a bit more than The Ruins gives you, which is: killer plants.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1.5/4
April 7, 2008
While not as silly as it sounds, it nevertheless is silly (as are most horror films), and while certainly different, the payoff isn't there.
April 5, 2008
The film's depiction of deteriorating-under-pressure group dynamics comes to an abrupt end just as it gets going
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
April 4, 2008
What a lovely movie.
Full Review
| Original Score: D
April 4, 2008
The Ruins offers further proof that what works on the printed page doesn't necessarily work on the big screen.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
April 4, 2008
Squabbling among the skin-deep characters doesn't induce much sympathy, though thesps do their best.
April 4, 2008
Paranoia, 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.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
April 4, 2008
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.
Original Score: 2/5