.: Roberts' Reviews - Movie Reviews :.

"Help! Please God Help! Help Me! Help!"

These seven words are screamed from a helpless unknown female in a darkened corner when - swoosh - something or someone snaps her from our screen view.

This is the start of the new thriller, The Ruins based on the novel by Scott B. Smith who penned the brilliant A Simple Plan back in 1998. I doubt the films could be further in subject matter from each other.

After we are left to wonder what the hell happens to the poor female in the opening, we are introduced to our cast of characters that will without doubt be victimized as a group and/or individually for the next 90 minutes. Like most films of the ilk, we have an equal number of males and females as we are introduced to two couples that will be the center our attention. Our first couple is Amy and Eric (Jenna Malone and Shawn Ashmore). She is the loose cannon but fragile framed girlfriend of Eric, the stoic med school student that will try and fill the big hero shoes when the they find themselves in peril. On the other side of the smooches are Jeff and Stacey (Jonathan Tucker and Laura Ramsey). Where Amy and Eric are developed characters, all we really know and care about Jeff and Stacey are that they are good to look at - and more importantly - expendable.

The group is sitting around a hotel pool on their final day of vacation when a stranger by the name of Dimitri comes with an offer to accompany him to an unexplored Mexican temple where his brother has mysteriously disappeared. For reasons that are actually quite plausible, the group accepts and the setting for the terror is in play.

After hiking through the jungle, the group (now consisting of six - Eric, Amy, Stacey, Jeff, Dimitri and some other guy that might as well be wearing a red shirt on a dangerous Star Trek excursion) come across the temple that last saw his brother.

Covered in vines and flowers, the temple looks like something that would bring Indiana Jones to orgasm. But there's a hitch. Once Amy steps on the plants that clings to the side of the steps, men from a nearby tribe encircle the gang communicating in their tone that they are angry at the temples disruption (Think of the tantrum that Woody Harreslson would react if you stomped on his private secret garden). What their shouting couldn't convey, their arrows and bullets come through with the upmost clarity as the 'other guy' is killed when trying to approach the tribesmen.

This leads the remaining five up the stairs of the temple where they watch in terror as what seems like an entire town of people circle the temple to ensure that no one comes down and that no one leaves alive.

But that is the least of their problems.

At the top of the temple, the group hears a cell phone ring and Dimitri is convinced that it is his lost brother's ringtone and sets down into the temple in search of his sibling. As the group lowers him into down into the darkened temple opening via a pulley mechanism, we have the one event in the film that you can see coming before it happens. The rope snaps. Dimitri falls and lies injured at the bottom of the pit.

The two couples think out their options and decide to send Stacey down into the darkness in an attempt to assist with Dimitri's plight. Her arrival injures her leg while revealing Dimitri's dire need of medical attention as not being able to feel below his waist.

They eventually do get Dimitri back up out of the temple. His legs completely damaged by the fall, the team will have to amputate his legs in order to ensure that infection does not set in. In a scene that had a few audience members turn their heads, Eric takes a rock separates flesh and bone.

Still. The least of their worries.

The Ruins is not about a tribe forcing some young American's to fight for survival atop a temple. It's not about trying to find a secret passage that will lead them to safety.

Instead, The Ruins surprised me by becoming a film where the shrubbery - the vines and flowers that clung to the temple walls - have an appetite for human flesh. Let me repeat that in case you are thinking it's the bad end of an April Fool's prank. The Ruins is a film where the shrubbery have an appetite for human flesh.

By infecting wounds and then growing inside the body, the plants begin to absorb their prey. If not growing from within, the vines quickly take any flesh that happens to be left unattended. You know. Amputated human legs and things like that.

The remainder of the film is the four surviving members struggling with their sanity and their survival as they fight off the Myan Little Shop of Horrors.

Words might not do The Ruins justice, but I liked it. I liked the fact that it was something that I haven't seen before (well, at least not in some time). It was refreshing to have something other than an axe wielding maniac or vampire type creatures living within the caverns of the temple to cause our characters so much grief.

I liked the fact that the film didn't try to explain what or why the plants became human eating carnivores. We don't get some half baked explanation like alien DNA or an ancient curse. It is what it is and the five young people atop the temple just have to live (or die) with not having it explained.

I liked the fact that I probably could have figured out the ending, but I didn't give it that much thought. I let it play out and I appreciated the body count and in the order to which they fell victim.

There are some issues with The Ruins. The arguments the group have amongst themselves seem forced and the dialogue at times is laughable ("Four American's don't just go missing!"). But no movie this side of Jaws has been perfect. The Ruins played like a terrifying Stephen King novel. And I put it beside The Mist as two of the better thrillers I have seen in recent times.