By Silvia Moreno-Garcia

I’m going to be blunt here, so if you’re spoiler-phobic, you’d better step away right now: I’ve never been afraid of killer plants. God knows they’ve had their share of appearances in horror literature and movies like The Day of the Triffids (1962), Little Shop of Horrors (the musical and Corman version) and The Happening (2008), but for the most part, they leave me cold. Add to that a cast of young students and it’s not a good combo.

However, despite the killer-plant bit, The Ruins isn’t awful. It’s not great and it didn’t scare me, but it has a couple of good scenes. Most of them involve impromptu surgery.

The Ruins has a group of students on vacation in Mexico who decide to check out the secluded Mayan ruins in the area. When they get there, they are greeted by an angry party of Mayans wielding bows and arrows, and a gun. These folks are not willing to let the tourists leave the top of the pyramid they’ve come to explore. Soon, it becomes obvious why: intelligent, carnivorous vines that can imitate ringtones and human voices inhabit the ruins.

Why the Mayans haven’t burned the plants is not explained. They do salt the ground around the pyramid and patrol the area, but getting rid of the things must not have crossed their minds.

A word about the Mayans in this movie: indigenous cultures really don’t get the respect that they should, both in real life and in film. While The Ruins doesn’t paint the villagers as evil (they’re effectively quarantining the area), it does offer an archaic vision of what it means to be Mayan: bows and arrows, and lots of screaming. Any inhabitant of Yucatan would be more likely to have a shotgun. It’s not like, when you go to Alaska, people are carrying flint spears, are they? Yet some of the villagers do indeed wield arrows from atop their horses.

I’m not going to dwell on the odd configuration of the pyramid, but I will add that there is a vague, colonialist vibe wafting through the ruins. It is best exemplified when one of the characters yells, “Four Americans on vacation don’t just disappear!” It’s hilarious, not only because of the inherent superiority complex in the statement, but because there is a German guy with the party. I guess he didn’t matter.

This sentence, coupled with some other moments, like the invasive camera gaze of a female character who keeps snapping pictures of the locals, had me squirming for a bit. Not in a scary-horror-movie kind of way, but in the sense that the movie seems to portray a fear of the exotic Other, as well as a thick self-entitlement by the protagonists (at one point, they discuss amputating a character’s legs without bothering to consult him). I suppose you could flip it around and say that the disregard of the characters for both logic and the Mayan ruins is the cause of their downfall, a kind of Spring-Break karmatic punch, but I don’t know.

As I mentioned before, the characters are the default youth of horror movies: thinly sketched. Of the five, the most compelling is the German tourist, followed by the young, would-be doctor. The eager doctor, by the way, is guilty of the most squirm-worthy scenes in the film. There’s an amputation and a surgery. Both of these moments are gory and gut-wrenching. The least effective moments include the “talking”, slithering vines. They’re not scary. The people atop the pyramid, trapped in a horrible situation with few resources, are the most interesting. The less we could have seen of this particular monster, the better.

The Ruins is a decent-enough horror flick, but as far as indigenous representations in film, I wish we could one day have a movie where the Mayans kick monster butt instead of standing below the pyramid.

I recommend watching it together with The Day of the Triffids for a plant-tastic evening.

Note: This was shot in Australia. Just in case you were wondering if that’s what Yucatan looks like.

You can purchase The Ruins through Amazon.com.

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