Not quite ruined

I’m not much of a horror-movie fan. So, when I watched “The Ruins,” I expected to be bored and disappointed. I was pleasantly surprised to find it a semi-intelligent, moderately frightening and an entirely enjoyable film.

The film opens with some Americans on vacation in Mexico. They meet a German tourist who convinces them to come with him to an archaeological dig to find his brother, who hasn’t been heard from recently. Once they reach the dig, they find an old Mayan temple. Some locals with guns force them to climb the temple, and won’t let them leave. The reason? There are plants on the temple that feed on human flesh and blood instead of water. Creepy.

The movie offers some good thrills and scares, relying mostly on tension and drama rather than gory visuals to frighten the audience, but it works well. The movie provides a few good visceral scares, as well as plenty of psychological drama.

The characters seem intelligent, the plants are scary and the locals are off-putting.
The only thing in the film that stands out as ridiculous is when the plants talk. They actually start mimicking sounds around them, like cell-phone rings and use those sounds to bring people close to them. This nearly ruined the movie for me, but I kept watching and was fairly entertained.

The special features are decent, with an unnecessary alternate ending and some interesting featurettes. But the commentary is uninteresting, as most commentaries are, but it’s worth the extra bucks to pick up the unrated special edition.

A fairly average movie in a genre filled with below-average offerings, “The Ruins” is a good watch for a Sunday evening with your buddies. You can both laugh at the movie’s more ridiculous moments, and cringe at the frightening parts.

It’s a movie well worth the time it takes to watch, but one to rent instead of buy.