Four American tourists, medical student Jeff (Jonathan Tucker), his free-spirited girlfriend Amy (Jena Malone), her best friend Stacy (Laura Ramsey) and the girl's beau Eric (Shawn Ashmore), are in Mexico for leisurely holiday when they run into a charming German named Mathias (Joe Anderson). He invites them to join him on excursion to an isolated Mayan pyramid to meet up with his brother and the man’s archaeologist girlfriend.

Jena Malone and Laura Ramsey try to survive Dreamworks Pictures' The Ruins

Looking for one last adventure before they fly back to the States the quartet quickly agrees, heading out with him the following morning. Upon arriving they discover things are not as they expected. Not only is the temple covered in strange green vines with eerie blood red flowers, a village of heavily armed natives is brutally obsessed with making sure they do not leave the ruins alive.

At first the group isn’t sure why, but as their injuries mount all starts to become clear. It isn’t them the villagers are afraid of; it’s what they’ve inadvertently stumbled into that has them terrified. With their nerves fraying by the second, the group soon comes to the conclusion they are not alone atop this ancient temple, a force unlike any they’ve ever known eager to make all of them its next meal.

Here’s a little secret. If a movie studio stages a screening for their latest enterprise the night before its national release it usually means the film is going to suck royally. Typically, in the case of horror or action films, this holds true nine times out of ten (i.e. recent releases Shutter and Doomsday), those genres in particular not overly reliant on critic reviews to find success as it is anyhow.

Shockingly (and pleasingly), the new Dreamworks’ thriller The Ruins bucks this trend and emerges as a gruesomely terrifying success. If the studio would have had a little bit of a backbone they would have screened this stripped-down and pleasingly scary adaptation of Scott B. Smith’s (A Simple Plan) best selling novel and let the chips fall where they may. While I’m not saying every person who writes about the film is going to feel the same as I do (the majority of critics typically not open to giving the genre the props it sometimes deserves), the picture is still solid enough they shouldn’t have been worried to show it. Plain and simple, I liked it, and my gut tells me audiences (and probably quite a few of my peers) are going to feel the same.

Smith’s screenplay is economical and streamlined, playing upon his books strengths and wisely ignoring many of its far more non-cinematic elements (thus thankfully no Audrey II comparisons) and instead keeps things more mysterious and cerebral. The movie is an escalating series of what-the-f**k moments and holy-s**t hysterics that kept me glued to my seat, and before I knew it I’d even broken my pen for taking notes in two due to the fact I kept inadvertently grabbing my arm rest and squeezing my own leg due to the unnerving tension over and over again.

Not that director Carter Smith’s production ever reaches the same mesmerizing and triumphantly frightening heights of recent horror sensations like The Descent or The Hills Have Eyes remake, but he does come awfully close. While there is an inherent silliness to some of this (and while the ecological allegories are a bit heavy-handed), there is a visceral simplicity to the scares that is inherently genuine. The film got under my skin, and while the breezily entertaining novel remains superior this adaptation is still good enough I’m not sure I’m going to be able to go to bed tonight without a light on.

From a purely technical standpoint, the team the filmmaker was able to assemble for this is almost beyond reproach. Master cinematographer Darius Khondji (an Oscar-nominee for Evita) does a crackerjack job with the visuals, while The Lord of the Rings trilogy production designer Grant Major does some of his most incredibly evocative and lush work. The four young stars are also surprisingly effective, the talented Malone (so good in both Saved! and Into the Wild) the obvious standout. 

All this aside, the biggest mystery here is still why Dreamworks didn’t have the guts to screen it. The Ruins is as effective a little shocker as I’ve seen this year, totally undeserving of the indignity of being labeled as a loser before it was even released. It’s a good film, sometimes beautifully so, and if people don’t come out afterwards a little shaken up and disturbed then they probably need to be checked for a pulse.

Film Rating: êêê  (out of 4)

Additional Links:

-  The Ruins Theatrical Trailer