The plan is 31 horror movies in 31 days. Two days and two posts means apathy can officially suck it.

The Ruins

The Ruins is essentially a movie about plants that want to kill you. Other stuff may happen, but the plants are always in the background plotting your demise.. Occasionally they are sneaky, often they are.. more direct. The movie begins as so many horror films do, with a group of naive twenty-somethings traveling to a foreign country only to discover that they probably should have vacationed at the Great Lakes or something.

Scott B. Smith is a Nerd Baller

I have nothing but respect for a guy who writes an amazing book like “A Simple Plan” and then jumps directly to a book / film about evil flesh eating plants. Apparently, he had film rights for “The Ruins” sold before the book was even out so it is conceivable that investors thought “The Ruins” would be about the destruction of world landmarks.

Loincloth Count: Zero

Through some standard plot devices (five teens.. at a rave.. on an island...), our group of slightly hungover explorers decide to visit a secret Mayan temple that does not appear on any maps. They find this super secret temple via a map provided by the brother of Mathias, one of the leads (?!). Upon arriving and making physical contact with the vines that grow on the the surface of the temple, some very angry locals show up and force them up onto the temple itself where they must remain or be shot (arrowed?) to death. The nice thing is that the locals aren’t your standard tribal archetypes. It would have been easy to go all “Cannibal Holocaust” and paint the temple folks as crazy cannibals or something but they thankfully resist. Once the nature of the vines is revealed, motivations become clear.

Clever Girl

I wont give away all the the tricks employed by the vines but I will say that they range from hilarious to grotesque. The icky side is undoubtedly where they have the most success because the practical effects in this movie are amazing. The characters engage in a variety of hunting-knife-surgical-procedures which are incredibly squirm inducing. The CG scenes where vines attempt to reach and touch somebody are perhaps less convincing.

This is The Way The World Ends

The ending to this movie is dumb. The DVD offers a variety of alternate endings and, predictably, they picked the least effective one. Even so, "The Ruins" was pretty fun. I might not be as good as the book, but what is?