The Ruins (2008)

This probably won’t strike many as too logical, but watching The Ruins brought me back to the 1980s, a time where there were, in addition to a bounty of slasher pictures, little biological curiosity horror films that always gave me nightmares (not that I would admit that to my parents, these movies were a hard enough sell as is). Biological curiosity movies are those monster movies where the human screws with a harder to describe than usual monster (you can’t just throw an ape or dinosaur label at these nasties) and turns into said monster themselves. The Ruins particularly reminded me of a strange, disturbing at the time film called Leviathan, where an underwater crew headed by Peter Weller drank ancient, drugged vodka and turned into fish men whose malleable, intangible design seemed, to me at least, to represent a mild theft of Chris Walas’ work on the Cronenberg Fly.

And again this might not seem too logical, because no one turns into anything in The Ruins, the young people of this film get off just a little easier comparatively. But The Ruins is similarly blunt and artless; lean and unpleasant in execution. Audiences who tire of the horror film for kids approach can at least be assuaged by that fact; the victims of The Ruins die, and quite hard. And the monster, while not capable of transferring his (or her, if you wish to be polite) identity to others, is invasive in other, at times unsettling, ways. The film, at its best, taps into one of those primal pressure points that can inspire sweat and insecurity at night: a festering something under the skin: the fear that you might pick up an unheard of malady while strolling through the woods one day.

On its own terms, The Ruins works, unfortunately though, I’ve read the book, so I’m inclined to introduce my own terms to the negotiations. The book and the script were written by Scott B. Smith of A Simple Plan, and in the book it was clear that Smith was trying to instill in the horror genre a bit of the character that made Plan so potent. The book built slowly, artfully, to a group disintegration that was unusually convincing for the genre. While they tend to be weak on characterization, the film of The Ruins could have used a bit of the slow wind of Carpenter’s The Thing or The Descent. The director here, Carter Smith, is choppy and matter of fact, intent on getting us atop the titular structure as fast as editing will allow. The misdirection of the book is still accounted for but considerably less elegant. The book leads us to believe that a Predator is about, only to sucker punch us with something more frighteningly banal, the film tips its hat a little early.

The characters, embodied by Jena Malone, Jonathan Tucker, Shawn Ashmore, and Laura Ramsey, remain surprisingly unsentimental though, and it’s in this department that the film scores its modest points. The most haunting death in the book, a self-mutilation, remains unshakably icky, but one can’t help but feel that it’s in the service of not too much. I don’t normally play the often unfair, generally irritating “but this isn’t like in the novel” game, but The Ruins was clearly conceived in cinematic terms to begin with, and promised a pop thriller that could’ve been in line with Jaws or The Silence of the Lambs, instead we got something closer to Jaws 2 (though better than that); not bad, scratches the itch, but that’s partially my issue with the film, there’s no itch left to ponder at night, when the things should really be eating at you.

★★½

Posted on April 7th, 2008 in Reviews, Horror, 2008 |

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