Carnivorous Cannabis: Finding The Ruins
Warning! The following review contains spoilers! Read at your own risk! Go see the movie at your own peril!
“This doesn’t happen! Four Americans on vacation do not just disappear!” This was the line that was spoken by the lead character, Jeff, that sums up the secret message of Hollywood’s latest horror outing – “DON’T LEAVE AMERICA! You are much too hot, rich and white! Foreigners will kill you!”
This, of course, is not an original sentiment. With movies like Hostel, Turistas, Primeval, The Abandoned, and Brokedown Palace, Hollywood has been feeding our country’s xenophobia with a brand of fear that makes the average white person want to stay in their own backyard for the rest of their lives. The Ruins is no different. It has all the usual trappings of the modern horror movie: impossibly attractive, vapid teenagers on vacation and scary people with different accents, language and/or skin tone. The film does have one point of originality though, and that is the killer ganja that needs the nourishment of human flesh. You heard me.
Two young couples, who you would rather see lounge around naked by a pool instead of speak, befriend a German guy who is going to meet up with his brother at a nearby pyramid discovery. Sign #1 that trouble is about to happen: If you meet up with someone that has a different accent than you, they will lead you to trouble. They might not want to kill you, but they just might plant drugs on you, in which case you’ll end up in a Chinese prison. The two couples are Amy (Jena Malone) who is a slut and Jeff (Jonathan Tucker) who is a med student, Stacy (Laura Ramsey) who is not a slut and Eric (Shawn Ashmore) who has a t-shirt with a bull’s eye on it. You can pretty much guess how Eric is going to end up.
After some Jena Malone bikini action and some Laura Ramsey nudity for no reason, they decide to go with the German named Mathias (Joe Anderson) and his Greek friend Dimitri (Dimitri Baves) to The Ruins. Sign #2: the taxi driver doesn’t want to go there. Even after being bribed, he drives there but does not want to stay. A lesson to all – listen to taxi drivers, they value their own life above all. Ok. They value money above all, but their own life is a CLOSE second.
In the jungle, they run into two dark, little children who remain silent when spoken to. This is Sign #3: children that just stare at you blankly are always trouble.
They come upon a large pyramid that is over grown with pot, a true hippie’s delight. Three natives ride in on horses brandishing pistols, bows and arrows. They scream at the group in a native language. This is Sign #4: if Juan Valdez and his merry men show up with weapons, why are you not already running?
After missing all the signs on the road map to pain, I no longer have any sympathy for these people. As far as I’m concerned, they asked for it. An unwritten law of horror movies is that the darkest person in the group is the first to go. They have no black people in this movie, so you can pretty much say goodbye, Dimitri. You didn’t really have anything to say, and you served the purpose of being racially challenged.
There is another unwritten law in horror: the weakest one shall survive. This usually means the one who is most injured or the most annoying. In this movie they went with most annoying.
Amidst all of this, there are plants that kill and mimic sounds that, although creepy, couldn’t help but make me think of Alice in Wonderland. If the Cheshire Cat showed up it would have been so much better.
This movie was just okay. I didn’t hate it, but it doesn’t try to be more than what the trailer already gives us. The killer pipe weed was a bit interesting, but the creators of The Ruins didn’t go far enough in explaining the plants or their relationship to the evil natives.
I do have to give Hollywood some credit that this at least wasn’t another remake. It was, however, an adaptation of a book, so that still reinforces the fact that Hollywood has completely run out of ideas. I would have preferred to see the archeologist’s earlier unseen encounter instead of the stock teenage characters. Why can’t these stories have characters that are intelligent and have set pieces that have actual back-stories?
At another time in Hollywood history these movies would have been different. They would have probably starred Karen Black and James Brolin. In the golden age of horror movies, these stories would have been about adults discovering, and then overcoming, obstacles. Now all we are allowed to see are attractive teenagers that have nothing to say other than how their own ignorance will be their inevitable undoing. And of course, there is the most valuable lesson: every white person in America should just stay where they are. Forever.
