“The Ruins”: I guess we didn’t need the sunblock.

Gooey. That’s how I felt after reading the book and it’s how I felt after watching the movie. This isn’t to say that The Ruins a novel by Scott Smith (writer of the brilliant A Simple Plan), who also wrote the screenplay of both films, is a simple splatter movie. On the contrary, it’s a dissection of the main characters (both figuratively and literally).

4 American early twenty somethings who have not a care in their lives and if they do they find a way to distract themselves rather than deal with it, find themselves in a dilemma in which they are forced to deal with something, that’s really quite horrific and unexpected, that pushes them all to the edge of their personalities and they end up doing more harm to each other than the incredibly deliberate something that they have to deal with in this film. You know they’re in for a bad time when “excavation site” and “not on the map” fall within a few sentences of each other.