The Ruins, which isn’t getting nearly enough love (which won’t be helped now that the summer blockbuster has been officially kicked off with the spectacular Iron Man), is something of a rarity in this day and age: a no-holds-barred R-rated horror flick. Of course, it got its butt kicked at the box office by the likes of abysmal-looking Prom Night (which I haven’t seen, so can only judge by the trailers and word of mouth).
Which is a shame because it’s really, really good. I was a big fan of the original book by Scott Smith (who also penned the book upon which A Simple Plan was based) and the entire time that I read it, I couldn’t help but imagine it as a film because it’s almost as if Scott Smith wrote the novel with the movie in mind. If done right, I thought, this could be a really cool, really different type of horror film.
And it is. And it’s pretty faithful to the book, though some of the situations were flipped around to affect different characters (and I believe one character was taken out completely) and the ending was changed.*
But that’s beside the point. It’s nice to get a horror movie with some balls every now and then, you know? The movie doesn’t showcase violence in the way that something like Hostel does, but the violent content in the film is very important, and the scenes that we do get are visceral in a way that makes the movie more effective. Most of the movie, yeah, could’ve been sold as a PG-13 affair if they’d cut out the language (and an all-too-brief topless scene featuring Laura Ramsey) but the brief scenes of violence are integral to the story.
I hope the movie finds a bit of a following once it hits DVD because, while it may not be a “classic” horror film and may not even end up being the best of the year (so far, it is), it’s still a worth entry into the genre, and one with a villain the likes of which we’ve never seen on screen before. Well, except that one time.
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