We Don’t Like Your Movie

So hello there, Constant Reader.

This site is about movies, tv, yadda yadda good god someone else has a blog. So what? We have opinions. Who doesn’t? Just because yours is wrong means nothing. We forgive you. That’s ok. Live and learn and whatnot.

So, enough with that nonsense. Let’s get started.

The Ruins (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0963794/)

From the novel by Scott Smith (A Simple Plan), The Ruins promised to be something a little out of the ordinary. There’s an interesting plot somehow involving maneating plants and yet this film does not star Rick Moranis, there is no one named Seymour and nothing yells out, “FEED ME!”

It seems that this could be the horror movie that finally moves the somewhat stubborn Hollywood away from the J-horror, C-Horror, T-horror or whatever-the-hell new Asian horror is being imported, retooled and re-ruined by the execs behind the big desks in Tinseltown.

Having read the novel, I was stoked both by this perhaps being the case, and looking forward to a good film from a very decent novel.

Not so much.

What The Ruins is not is the definitive, go-see horror film of this season. Hardly. What it is, however, is at least suitable for a Friday evening rental from Giant DVD and Tape Rental Chain and that’s, well, about it.

First and foremost of note to director Carter Smith: pretty, pointless twenty-something on a vacation in Mexico who seem to have no money issues, no fat-to-body-mass-index problem and no problems at all, really—unless one counts an incessant need to whine and make pouty faces—do not make for an engaging set of characters. Which is one thing if the plot concerns Freddy or Jason. Or even Jigsaw. But when you’re setting people into the heart of the jungle to face killer plants covering ancient ruins protected by vigilant (if not downright ornery) villagers, a little substance could be appreciated, you know?

Let’s write out the pretty and pointless whiners and perhaps sketch in a family with real problems on vacation. Perhaps the father truly wanted to connect with his wife and kids. Something the rest of us mortals not carved from the ephemera of the gods can actually relate to.

Just a thought.

Everybody wants to see pretty people. And there are movies for that (Into the Blue, for one). But the entire point of a scary movie is to, hopefully at some point, get scared. At least creeped out. Perhaps just weirded out a little. Something. Anything. And the only way to do that is to make the audience give a damn about the characters. And no one did. Well, I didn’t, and that’s all the people I’m really concerned with when I’m watching a film.

The result being not a single fright. Not. One. Granted, I’m a little jaded. However, I may not get terrified but I know when a moment is truly creepy, and this film had none. Case in point: the plants could mimic cell phones. Hell, they could mimic people talking by vibrating rapidly. One would think that, in the middle of the jungle surrounded by irate villagers pointing guns and bows and arrows, not to mention the man eating plants, that hearing your own voice bounced back at you would scare the bejesus out of you. Well, it didn’t. It just seemed idiotic.

There’s a good bit more I could go into. However, in fairness to keep from posting spoilers, I will not.

If you’re into gratuitous physical beauty with no point and attempting to pack a few hundred pages of a decent novel into a not very decent film trying to be frightening and failing miserably, what the hell? Go see it.

Uncle Not Clever’s Non-Patented Yet Reliable Movie Rating: I wouldn’t walk to the TV to turn it off if I couldn’t find the remote.

Addendum: Did I mention there’s a hand job in the movie? No? There’s a hand job in the movie. What. The. Hell?