A quartet of Americans vacationing Mexico encounter a menace far worse than Montezuma's Revenge.
Ok folks, here's the scenario: You're vacationing in Mexico when a random 
German guy approaches you out of nowhere, inviting you to join him on a tour of an abandoned, unsupervised archaeological dig located in a remote part of the jungle. What do you do? If you're the appropriately dim yet attractive protagonists of the new horror flick The Ruins, you jump at the chance, of course! And don't bother to heed the ominous warnings of the spooked natives, either. What do they know? They don't even speak English!
To be fair, The Ruins is a far better flick than the above intro suggests. Based on the bestseller by A Simple Plan author Scott Smith and directed by newcomer Carter Smith, The Ruins takes the familiar nature-versus-man horror concept -- in this case, killer vines versus slow-witted college grads -- and executes it successfully. Smith's story is very much a slow burn, not revealing said killer vines until far into the movie, when the unfortunate kids 
become trapped in the Mayan temple and are forced to choose between death by ravenous plants or death by the angry indigenes who aren't too keen on the trespassing tourists.
Those vines play a mean game of psychological warfare, too, messing with the characters' (and by extension, the audience's) heads until they're practically begging for death. In the end, most of the movie's gore is actually handed out by the characters, either on each other or themselves, while the sadistic flora are content to sit back and watch the grisly action.
As one would expect from a horror flick, the performances aren't much to write home about, but they aren't so bad as to be distracting, either. Stars Jonathan Tucker, Jena Malone, Shawn Ashmore and Laura Ramsey are generally convincing as boneheaded tourists, and most of the laughs elicited by their dialogue are of the intentional variety. What matters most in a horror flick, however, are the scares, and The Ruins delivers enough of them to qualify as a solid choice for fans of the genre.
ReelzChannel Rating: 
Disagree? Let me know at tleupp@reelzchannel.com