The Ruins: B

The slasher film, wherein a group of impossibly good-looking and impossibly young actors and actressess are systematically slaughtered by a ruthless serial killer for a Reason (i.e. You accidently killed my relative! You're my food supply! You look good when you scream!), is pretty laughable in the modern age of Hollywood cinema. Other sub-genres of horror have either done systemic slaughtering better (The Descent) or with far more jumpy-fright-humor (Hostel); yet "the slasher film" persists. Why? In 2006, a novel by Scott Smith came out that declared asking such a question null-in-void. In fact, The Ruins made such a game of cat-and-mouse an extraordinarily chilling, artful affair; the incisive psychodrama of his previous novel A Simple Plan, coupling nicely with a goretastic horror fable (the moral lesson being watch where you vacation) pulled straight from Little Shop of Horrors. On the page, as a 21st-century "slasher film" (one where the killer isn't so much angry as green...and leafy), The Ruins was a triumph. But how would it far on screen, where audiences are treated every month to another bold and disquieting torture-porno-slasher-horror-gore-phantasia? Honestly? Pretty well, if a trifle obvious and restrained.

The story: Amy (Jena Malone) and Stacy (Laura Ramsey) are two best friends vacationing in Cancun with their respective boyfriends, Jeff (Jonathan Tucker) and Eric (Shawn Ashmore) when the group decides to go with their new German friend Mathias (Joe Anderson) to a Mayan ruin to track down Mathias' brother Henrich. Once there, they discover some things not entirely to their liking (read: fatal), and must attempt to survive not only the sentient vines thirsting for their blood, but also their own poisonous and volatile group dynamic. The additions to the story - as additions must inevitably be made to anything, living or inanimate, that flies to L.A. - are curious, if forgivable. One: a creepy, 30-second prologue that lets the former-reader in on the plights of Henrich and his archeologist girlfriend. Two: a subtly re-vamped quintet, with character-specific personalities and plights tweaked and swapped in an attempt to maximize auidence interest. (Though, surely, having Eric still fall victim to the vines represents no obvious deficiency over having Stacy be the riddled sad-sack?) And three: a compacted plot structure with a radically different ending.

Of all of these changes, only two of the three fall flat - and only sparingly. The first is the second, which poses a problem only insofar that it deadens the cutting edge of Smith's (who wrote the script himself) observation, once so scalding on the page. There, cocooned with the group amidst hundreds of pages, the trvialities and spats nestled in any relationship became fascinating chemicals which we as readers got to see boil and explode into an ever-deadlier cocktail. As a film, there is hardly enough time to treat this point with enough longevity and respect, and so Smith shortens and quickens the most necesary parts of his investigation into group-survival into a useful, if somewhat muddled, creep-out. (To wit, no matter who was originally the victim, seeing Stacy stand on sun-blasted rock as she flays herself alive is a startlingly powerful image.) And the second is the third, which irks me only because it softens and brightens the delightfully sour original ending for a final sequence that isn't necesarily romanticized (it isn't as though they all survive), so much as it is improbable according to the book's original schematics.

But that's the thing: director Carter Smith and writer Scott B. Smith tweak the literary property just barely here and there, creating alternately discord and terror. As a director, Carter Smith adheres well to the genres tropes of gore and suspenseful scores (that leap and tear at you in all the right places); and Scott Smith retains enough of the terror of his novel to make this a successful slasher-film-update, but where has all the bleakness gone? Especially after noticing what powerful performances Malone, Ramsey, Ashmore, and Tucker give, it's difficult not to have wanted more of the pages' trademark high-brow dread heaped upon them, if only to see what delightful ways they squirm beneath it. Still, The Ruins is no clunker, not exactly. It has more vitality than most Watch-the-Teens-Die! films, if only because it retains maybe half of the book's psychoanalytical bent, and more pedigree and talent than one expects. Anyone who has read the book will be scared and dissapointed in (mostly) equal measure. Anyone else will just be scared.