The Ruins

Some horror films come across as if they were made by folks who think the target demographic wants it dumb, with unlikable characters who you’re eager to see get it and heavy on the thinly veiled torture porn when they do. This is one of them, a silly creature that plays like Cabin Fever, but with all intentional humor removed. Not that it isn’t consistently funny, because it is. I just don’t think they meant the things that are funny to play that way. Adapted from his own novel by Scott B. Smith (A Simple Plan), here we have a small band of college kids taking a break from their south-of-the-border partying to investigate an ivy-shrouded Mayan temple in the middle of the Mexican jungles. Things go bad, and fast, when the locals show up with guns and force them to the top of the altar. What is waiting for them in the bowels of the ancient pyramid is sorta silly, but sorta cool. Too bad any attempt at being scary was undermined by the filmmaker’s aggressively stupid and willfully ignorant approach to disregarding any sort of internal logic in order to set up the next writhe-in-the-seat moment.