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The Ruins opened on Friday, like most horror movies, with a single, late Thursday night “promo” selection, which the press was invited gamely in the full knowledge that it would be too late for consideration even in the case of any reasonable time Web. What is different about The Ruins is that it is not a remake, or even a copy of any horror film of recent years. We are talking about first-class equipment, adapted from a novel by Scott B. Smith, who wrote the book hypnotist 1993 A Simple Plan, Sam Raimi and the masterful 1998 film of the same name. This is a great novel by plane, surprising and exciting, and Dreamworks could have made a movie of it. But threw it away, perhaps deliberately, in the hope that some of opening weekend green, and little care to do something worthwhile or lasting (A Simple Plan).
The material is still here, and the director chosen for the job, Carter Smith, it could not completely crush (again, Smith wrote his own screenplay). Smith in the novel that barely aware that the main characters are vapid twentieth somethings on holiday in Australia, simply because the writer lavishes such fine detail to give out. In the film, we find the characters swiftly and take action. Amy (Jena Malone) and Stacy (Laura Ramsey) are best friends, you stay at a resort with their boyfriends, Jeff (Jonathan Tucker) and Eric (Shawn Ashmore), which did not seem to have much in common. They meet Mathias (Joe Anderson), Germany, which tells about his brother, who has disappeared with a girl to visit some ancient ruins secret. He is about to go out to look for him there, which joins him? After a night of drinking, dancing and done, they depart.
The ruins are quite spectacular, it’s like a pyramid with a flat top and around every step, which is in a clearing in the jungle. Vines cover almost every square inch except a ladder to the middle of a party, and a great cleaning at the top. After a few minutes, a band of Mayan sentries appear and show they mean business by killing one of the friends of Matthias. Tourists would not come down debris. There is a deep hole at the top and can hear the brother of Matthias of ringing cell at the bottom of the same. Mathias falls, but falls and breaks their backs. Stacy falls after him and cuts his leg. We realize that you have to spend the night and food rations and water. They bicker, and things get progressively worse. (Hint: there is something supernatural at work.) Because I do not think some things were cut, especially since one of the stills the film shows the characters cavorting in a storm, which never happens.
The main characters are pretty vapid; Jeff is studying to be a doctor and he takes the initiative and makes the most of the difficult decisions. He goes to bed early and seems responsible, but beyond that we do not know him very well. Amy and Stacy are differentiated by the fact that Amy is a brunette with glasses and Stacy is a blonde. Amy major character trait is that she got drunk the night before and began to do with Jeff Mathias then went to bed. The other kids have no real personality distinct from the clothing and the state of their beards. But not knowing the characters does not prevent the film from rising tension, when it is supposed to. Smith ingenious story takes place in just the right layers, with characters doing a terrible discovery after another. But every time the movie gone to a new level, I mourned the fact that he had been thrown out an amateur director (with only one or two films to his credit), instead of a proven master of the genre.
Smith directs the film in a completely rudimentary fashion, the line of Horror 101. Half dog jumps out of the back of a truck and “shock” us. A girl sits in the dark with his face away from the camera; Stacy when she arrives for her, the girl becomes the head and suddenly jolts to the eye, hateful and a half decomposed. (Where have I seen that before? Oh yeah. Psycho.) Whenever something happens tense, the camera begins Smith agitation and wandering everywhere, cutting almost arbitrarily instead of letting it come to rest or discover anything. Now consider that John Carpenter has not directed a film since 2001, Tobe Hooper, or who have trouble financed films. The supernatural element of The Ruins also applies directly to the sensitivity of David Cronenberg, it is usually dealt with body issues. Not to mention that Wes Craven, George A. Romero, Brian De Palma and John Landis are almost always available these days.
If the study is just going to give up this project, why not spend the same amount of money and effort the recruitment of one of these semi-forgotten masters to do the job? It made me think frankly angry at the disregard and contempt that must have had for this project, for the public and horror in general. And to make matters worse, The Ruins eventually emerges as an average horror picture, and several steps above every other horror picture released this year. (Even it was an “R” of stars, with nudity and liberal use of the “F” word.) That without even trying.
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