The Big Whatsit

I know this question has been asked countless times before, but The Ruins begs it again. Why (oh why oh why) do characters in horror movies walk willingly into the jaws of death? From the moment the film starts, it’s absolutely clear what’s going to happen. Here’s a checklist of the elements needed to spell out the rest of the plot:

• Four young, good looking Americans on holiday.
• A mysterious, ancient building in the middle of nowhere.
• A rough map to its location.
• Locals who want nothing to do with the place.
• Someone who has previously ‘disappeared’ whilst researching said building.
• One of the Americans isn’t very keen on going.

Honestly, it’s like Scream never happened, though of course with something as uninspired as The Ruins, there’s barely room for any of that postmodern, ironic nonsense. I like to imagine the conversation between Pete and his unwilling girlfriend, Amy, going as follows:

‘Pete, I don’t want to go.’

‘Are you still not feeling well?’

‘No, it’s just obvious we’re walking towards our doom.’

‘Yes but Amy if we don’t go there, what’s the rest of the movie going to be about? Why would anyone care about a story in which four glamorous, vapid tourists are invited to a mysterious monument and decide not to visit it?’

One of the film’s biggest problems is its main characters. It’s not that they aren’t very likeable, as such, more that they aren’t really developed. The Ruins isn’t really about them. They’re pawns, cyphers that are required for no other reason than to give us a reason to go to the ruins, which turns out to be an ancient Mayan temple covered with carniverous vegetation. It’s as though writer Scott B Smith and director Carter Smith know we are never really going to connect with the cardboard cut-out leads, so they don’t bother to make us try, instead shuffling them from A to B as quickly as possible in order to let the horror take over.

Worse still than the Americans is Joe Anderson, who plays Mathias. Mathias holds the map that leads them all to the ruins. His reason for going is that his girlfriend was carrying out excavations, but he hasn’t heard from her in some weeks and foolishly naturally resolves to find out what’s happened. As suggested by the name, Mathias is German, yet instead of hiring a German actor we have Anderson, whose comedy accent would guarantee him work on a remake of Allo Allo. He’s even more thinly drawn than the Americans, the most interesting of whom is Amy, played by Jena Malone. Best known as Gretchen in Donnie Darko, Malone is better than this kind of stuff, and tries gamely to invest her character with a little humanity. Otherwise, I don’t remember a thing about her friends - who they are, why they’re there, why I should give a stuff about whether they make it out of the ruins alive.

The Ruins fairly shamelessly rips off a number of other movies. Links with The Beach are obvious, though I was also struck with its similarities to The Descent, Neil Marshall’s superior fright flick about a bunch of women who go potholing into one hell of a mess. What it loses is all sense of The Descent’s subtlety. Whereas much of Marshall’s film took place in the dark, meaning its shocks and nastiness were at best half-lit and implied much of the gore and violence, thereby leaving our imagination to fill in the blanks, there’s no such luck here. In The Ruins’ most infamous scene, our heroes decide to amputate another character’s legs, using whatever tools they have at their disposal - tequila, a rock and a blade of dubious sharpness and zero sterility. As the grisly operation takes place, the camera doesn’t flinch. There’s no cut away, no reprieve. And it’s here that the obvious third inspiration appears. The Ruins is a by-product of the horror environment established by Hostel, and all its ‘torture porn’ spin-offs. And like the majority of those films, it tries to substitute unpleasantness for anything very frightening, and of course just ends up leaving a bad taste in the mouth.

My real problem with The Ruins, however, is that it’s derivative of much earlier works. As the characters worked their inevitable way towards the temple, the thought kept striking me that this was just like Dracula: Prince of Darkness. Exactly like in the 42-year old Hammer movie, our heroes travel towards their doom, ignore the concerns of the one who has a bad feeling about it (Barbara Shelley in Drac; Malone here) and brush off any warnings along the way. In D:PoD, it became utterly clear the heroes were in trouble once their coach driver refused to take them anywhere near Castle Dracula. It’s a cab driver in The Ruins. ‘Eees bad place,’ he warns in a tourist-friendly Mexican drawl, until the sight of some dollars changes his mind. Presumably in the twenty first century, moral scruples are wiped out by the acquisition of wealth, though any allegorical message the film might have had starts and ends here.

Despite obviously costing a lot more money to make than Teeth, The Ruins made me miss Mitchell Lichtenstein’s wittier and far cleverer little film. It’s utter pulp, told without guile or any degree of sympathy for its characters. It doesn’t even have the morally bankrupt undertone of Hostel. The message of the movie appears to be this - if you are thinking of going to an ancient temple in the middle of nowhere, then don’t. And that’s it. The Ruins isn’t recommended to anyone save those people who want to know how to perform amateur amputative surgery under extreme pressure.