Post by slayrrr666 on Nov 1, 2010 10:59:27 GMT -5
"The Ruins" is one of the most enjoyable and entertaining entries recently.
**SPOILERS**
Vacationing in Mexico, friends Jeff, (Jonathan Tucker) Amy, (Jena Malone) Stacy, (Laura Ramsey) and Eric, (Shawn Ashmore) run into fellow tourist Mathias, (Joe Anderson) who tells them that he's meeting with friends at a Mayan Temple excavation site nearby. Agreeing to go along, they head out to the location and find the temple, only to get into a confrontation with the locals and wind up trapped on top of the temple. Unable to leave, for the natives block every escape attempt with homicidal intent, they decide to camp there until help arrives, only to be constantly attacked by strange vines. Realizing that the vines are actually alive and are driven to feed on living flesh and with the natives still holding them up, they struggle to survive the several deadly situations they are in.
The Good News: 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. This is done through the rather creepy vines, which are 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 and from what they do later on to them, it makes for a really great threat. Their actions are also worthwhile in making them feared, and those scenes are really well-done. The big one is the scene 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 it's powers, snaking out of the shadows to devour and consume fallen parts of a mangled body in front of everybody. These are both awesome moments that go to show the vines as forces to be reckoned with. This one also manages to feature two incredibly brutal scenes that are simply uncomfortable to watch. The first, and best, 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, and overall it's a great scene. The other big one, where one of the characters undergoes an operation that 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. This one is quite bloody, with a couple shot up with arrows, an incredibly messy gunshot, the aforementioned scenes with the broken legs and the removal surgery as well as another scene where another victim starts to cut themselves all over the body, from the head, chest, shoulders, arms, legs and their back, resulting in a severely bloodied body from head to toe that is quite grotesque-looking and provides the biggest parts of the gore. Combined with a furious pace and a rather nice nude scene, this one is a lot of fun.
The Bad News: There wasn'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. The reasoning is based around two key scenes involving characters touching the vines. When one of the leads trips and falls into them, despite not knowing what they are, leads the natives into high-pitched yelling and screaming and leading the others up the temple, giving the natives several opportunities to get a shot at killing that one. Even still, the scene lasts for a good minute or so, from the moment they fall into the vines to when they begin the ascent up the temple. Later, when one of the natives' children merely touches it through absolutely circumstantial means, without mercy the child is shot at point blank range. 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. 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. All the back-stories to this is never given and is left a mystery. These here are the film's flaws.
The Final Verdict: Without damaging flaws of any kind of a lot of good points about it, this is one of the more entertaining and worthwhile entries around. Highly recommended to those who enjoy these kinds of films or to those who find it interesting, while those who aren't big on the style should heed caution.
Rated R: Graphic Violence, Graphic Language and Brief Nudity
