Grade:        C

Moral:        Amputation sucks.

Another instance of horror wherein White People Go Where They Shouldn’t, The Ruins legitimatizes itself by giving us not characters too stupid for their own good, but characters too smart. Then again, it also demonstrates that stupidity per se was never really the issue with middling pulp-horror, but that these movies function so transparently as surrogative rollercoasters: buy the ticket, watch a bunch of caricatures get lost in the jowls of a masticating screenplay, and then move on to some other distraction.

It’s well-shot, well acted, and written with a perceptive intelligence (at least in terms of survival particulars), but it churns along with such a glum dedication to its own genre confines that it seeps well past horror and eventually becomes somewhat desperate; that is, it’s an existential crisis arising unnaturally from a low-rung horror flick. To wit: it’s too consummate, too intelligent to be written off merely as a money-machine or the blase droppings of filmmakers obsessed with ‘blood ‘n guts,’ so why does it exist? It’s not really scary beyond baseline violence and the silly threat of EVIL PLANTS (botanophobists beware!), and it’s about as ‘fun’ as watching a bug slowly drown in a jar of honey, given how vicious and dour it becomes.

Granted, it’s refreshing to see horror that doesn’t slather itself in precessed subtext and specious politicking, all in a hoary bid for subversive street-cred: most nowadays arrive half-soused on their own forced-allegorical fumes (for instance, Eli Roth ‘dealing’ with the Ugly American mindset in Hostel), whereas The Ruins is appreciably stripped-down to the basics. On the other hand, the film ultimately just ends up flailing and moaning with little import: considering it takes place almost entirely atop a Mayan pyramid and casts foliage as its bogeyman, this isn’t exactly a raw tapping of primal terror. If anything, The Ruins is so mechanical and routine that it comes off as but a filmic version of the Thunderdome: six characters enter; one character leave!