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07/18/08
The Ruins (2008)
46 %
Reviews Counted: 74 Fresh: 34 Rotten:40 Average Rating: 5.4/10
Consensus:
Despite a solid cast and truly frightening source material, The Ruins founders, thanks to a weak script and an excess of gore.
Rated: 18
Runtime: 1 hr 31 mins
Theatrical Release: 20-06-2008
Synopsis: Author Scott Smith adapts his own popular 2006 novel in this unsettling and surprising horror yarn. In its first half hour, THE RUINS seems to be cut from the same "body-count-of-young-Americans-abroad" cloth as HOSTEL and TURISTAS, but the film has a supernatural element not present in... [More]
Genre: Horror/Suspense
Starring: Jonathan Tucker, Jena Malone, Shawn Ashmore, Laura Ramsey, Joe Anderson
Director: Carter Smith
Screenwriter: Scott B. Smith
Producer: Ben Stiller, Stuart Cornfield, Chris Bender
Screenwriter: Scott B. Smith
Producer: Ben Stiller, Stuart Cornfield, Chris Bender
Reviews
Top Critic
Well filmed and acted, but with a plot as cheesy as a 1950s B-movie, this film is fairly creepy but not very scary
06/19/08
... soft-core torture porn that quite literally sets up its pretty, Hollywood protagonists for brutal sacrifice.
08/01/08
Not just if you're a horror fan but also if you enjoy a well fashioned, slimy yarn to get wrapped up in.
07/14/08
Competent but somewhat slack, modest (and modestly budgeted) shocker that doesn't work quite hard enough to justify its plot mechanics. [Blu-Ray]
07/10/08
...gets bloodier as it goes along, substituting close-up gore for horror, grossness for fright. (Unrated Edition)
06/23/08
... it's only after you've left the theater that you realize just how totally, utterly ludicrous the movie really is.
06/17/08
It's the kind of film that Sam Raimi might have directed 20 years ago, except that Carter Smith plays it straight, even though he seems to assume the audience won't.
06/09/08
This movie wasn't screened for critics. That's too bad, because this movie was surprisingly well done.
06/08/08
Just when you thought that a horror/thriller movie couldn't get more violent and gruesome; think again!
05/24/08
It may be just another white-kids-get-killed chiller, but it's a solidly made white-kids-get-killed chiller; nothing new, yet expertly put together.
04/17/08
THE RUINS has turned over a new leaf in horror and will get inside even the thickest of horror fans' skin.
04/17/08
Gore hounds will definitely be pleased as The Ruins boasts some of the most sickening blood and guts this side of snuff films.
04/15/08
Loved the book, enjoyed the movie. Jonathan Tucker ably leads a cast of uninteresting co-stars.
04/13/08
These are the beautiful people, and by the end of The Ruins we'll have spent a lot of time watching them go downhill.
04/11/08
[The filmmakers] avoid unwanted laughs only by resorting to relentless sadism. They let us know right off that nothing good will follow, and they carry it straight through to the abandon-all-hope-and-wait-for-the-sequel ending.
04/11/08
Stripped of the novel's kudzu-like excess, the story loses its timeless, nightmarish, existential power and becomes another cautionary tale in which beautiful and privileged post-9/11 young people learn the world is no longer safe for Americans.
04/11/08
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