It's both craftily creepy (in a subtle way) and powerfully visceral (in a kick-ass way), plus it delivers its payload in a slick and efficient 91-minute burst of nastiness.
Comment
04/04/08
The Ruins (2008)
46
%
Tomatometer
How does the Tomatometer work 
Reviews Counted:80
Fresh:37
Rotten:43
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.
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... [More]
Starring: Jonathan Tucker, Jena Malone, Shawn Ashmore, Laura Ramsey
Director: Carter Smith
Reviews for The Ruins
Not quite on par with something like The Descent but close enough to not make you feel as if you've been ripped off.
04/04/08
The Ruins offers further proof that what works on the printed page doesn't necessarily work on the big screen.
04/04/08
Squabbling among the skin-deep characters doesn’t induce much sympathy, though thesps do their best.
04/04/08
Top CriticParanoia, spinal injuries, psychic distress, impromptu amputations, self-mutilation -- it’s all in there, convincingly rendered (the first-rate sound design exacerbates every fracture) and finally pointless.
04/04/08
With Scott Smith's rep and a best-selling horror novel, a sexy location and solid young cast, you'd have hoped the studio would find a director with a little more than a Tommy Hilfiger commercial under his belt.
04/04/08
Not even a fixer-upper, The Ruins should be considered a complete tear-down.
04/04/08
Top CriticThough commentaries on politics, nature and evolution arise, the film doesn’t push them too hard or far as such might detract from the slow building bedlam—which is strikingly satisfying.
04/04/08
To sum up The Ruins, I'll quote one of the characters: "This is so not okay."
04/04/08
The finale of The Ruins makes the film feel like a cheap cop-out … a claim no one would ever make about the novel.
04/04/08
At once silly, gross and boring...aims to be something more than a generic vacationing-twentysomethings-in-peril movie, [but] its pretensions make it even more ludicrous.
04/04/08
The Ruins is one of the creepiest, most disturbing tales to hit theaters in months. If there is a film that is guaranteed to make your skin crawl, this one is it.
04/04/08
The shift from averting your eyes from the gore to rolling your eyes at the stupid dialogue is enough to give you a headache.
04/04/08
The tourists' fears have infected their very beings, and their decisions are increasingly ineffective precisely because they are based on fear and ignorance.
04/04/08
...like "Touristas" with a better cast, higher production values and a supernatural edge...hits all the novel's outer horror touch points, but director Carter Smith doesn't let them build so much as check them off a list that he's rushing through
04/04/08
It may not be as fundamentally unsettling as the book was, but it's not a bad horror flick.
04/04/08
The characters are so one-note and unlikable that most viewers will find themselves looking forward to their grisly demises because it means that they won't be annoying us anymore.
04/04/08
Near-perfect at manipulating its audience...it's a marvelous nightmare machine.
04/04/08
The lack of explanations in The Ruins may prove unsatisfying to some, but the unknown is often more terrifying than the tangible. Such are the wages of fear.
04/04/08
Letting it get under your skin doesn't sound so bad once it gets inside your head.
04/03/08
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