Review of The Ruins (2008) by Ken S — 04 Dec 2010

When I finished this movie, I have to admit the first thing I thought was how good it would have been with Boris Karloff...or Peter Cushing..or any other horror great. Isle of the Dead came to mind, another quasi-horror movie with an isolated cast, faceless menace, and where human nature is just as horrible as any other threat in the movie.

The premise of the movie is pretty good and the execution of the movie is solid, but the cast is so underwhelming. You need a really game cast for a story like this and it really needed to be cast like 2005's The Cave, a mixture of young actors and then some like Cole Hauser to round it out.

The characters all pretty much exist only on top of that pyramid, with only Jonathan Tucker's character having any backstory to speak of whatsoever. There is no suspense in a story when you don't really believe any of the characters are going to make it out alive; what you have instead is a typical slasher movie scenario, but this movie screamed for something a little more authentic.

As I said before, I imagined this movie pulling it off with some of the horror greats and I found myself lamenting the fact that we really no longer have those wonderful ready and able character actors for this generation.

The last horror character of note, Robert Englund is long out of the B-movie territory and his fame is not rooted in the vast repertoire of say a Vincent Price or even Donald Pleasence. The movie is interesting and the potential was there for a good survival-chiller, but this cast sinks it.