by Jason Daniel Baker

Created on: July 25, 2008   Last Updated: July 26, 2008

The Ruins (2008) Starring Shawn Ashmore, Jena Malone. Laura Ramsey, Jonathan Tucker, Joe Anderson, Sergio Calderon, Jesse Ramirez, Balder Moreno, Dimitri Baveas, Walter Quispe, Pauline Whyman, Karen Strassman, Jordan Patrick Smith, Michelle Atkinson, Alexander Gregory.

Directed by Carter Smith.

Runtime: 90 minutes.

Rating: (Brutal Violence, Nudity, Coarse Language)

"You're not listening to me!"

Eric (Ashmore), Amy (Malone), Stacey (Ramsey) and Jeff (Tucker) are four attractive young American college students on vacation in Mexico who end up doing nothing but getting wasted and lying around poolside for most of their visit. They are enticed to visit a Mayan ruin off of the official maps by German tourist Mathias (Anderson) who is looking for his archaelogist brother. They find themselves less than welcome and anyone can see this is going to end up wrong. But not everyone can necessarily foresee how it will end up that way.

A group of idle kids go somewhere they are not supposed to go and bad things start happening? Nothing new there, thats how these movies work. They float upon the logic of the urban legends we have heard before and evolve from previous films in the genre. There are so many "city kids in the wilderness with a horrific trouble" movies out there that it has actually become a genre in itself. The very appealing and clever twist is here is the nature of the resourceful and imaginative monsters and their rather ingenious way of luring modern kids to their doom. I am more open minded about film productions which try to do something a little different within a genre and at the very least attempt to carve out their own niche.

Together the kids depicted here do have their moments of assigning blame and questioning each other. But they do not override all logic. Each of the characters shows finiteness in the lead up to the finale. All of them make bad calls or lack of any kind of call that might improve things. They each also make good calls after being peripherally and directly responsible for their perplexing predicament. As a result we see that unlike in many of these kinds of films the characters here are not dumb and unappealing. In fact, the entire idea of this film seems to be getting the audience to hope they make it out rather than despise them enough to want to see them die miserable deaths.

Hollywood's renewed predilection for grisly medieval violence/"Gore-ror" or torture porn or whatever you want to call it is well-reflected here in the murder of

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