The Ruins Rocks, May Make You Take a Hammer to Your House Plants

Opening today is The Ruins, director Carter Smith’s flesh-crawling adaptation of Scott Smith’s creepy novel about a bunch of American kids on vacation in Mexico who unwisely head to a remote Mayan ruin where there is supposed to be an archaeological dig going on. When they get there they are confronted with some angry natives and are only allowed to continue upwards to the precipice of the ruins where terror awaits them in the form of carnivorous vines. The book was a beautiful tour-de-force... a bloodcurdling page turner. And anyone who has seen Carter Smith’s brilliant, disturbing, short film Bugcrush knows he is the right man for this job. The unlucky tourists (Jonathan Tucker, Jena Malone, Shawn Ashmore, Laura Ramsey, Joe Anderson) act convincingly frightened, and the movie has a perfect nightmarish claustrophobia to it. It also makes you want to take a hammer to your house plants when you get home. It confounds me that Dreamworks didn't screen this for critics because it really rocks!