Based on scripter Scott B Smith’s own novel, The Ruins is a wilfully dumb hybrid of ordeal-horrors Paradise Lost and Cabin Fever, with just a sprinkle of Better Homes And Gardens bunged in for added absurdity. On their hols in Mexico, a quintet of preppy, over-privileged college creeps (one of whom is Into The Wild’s Jena Malone) decide on a whim to explore the ruins of a forbidden, off-the-map Mayan temple. When they get there, they’re forced at gun-and-arrow-point by the locals to the apex, where a bunch of people-eating leaves and vines await. Fright-free but bursting and swelling with gruesome self-mutilation and non-anaesthetised amputations, this is a tatty, yawn-inducing exploitationer that seems mostly to be about bad cellphone service – the search for a working signal taking up a good 20 minutes of the film’s running time. Senseless.
