anticipate or don't THE RUINS based on the kind of interesting horror novel of same name but looks like just another lame horror movie in trailers

i haven't read a simple plan, i know it's supposed to be better than the ruins. i like his writing pretty well. shifting between the characters' points of view was handled well, he keeps looping back to run parallel chronologies and interior monologues. (the book is full of interior monologues.)

haw. i watched the trailer tonight and imagined some dumb 20-something scriptwriter vacationed in mexico and then landed a deal through nepotism. this has 'March' written all over it.

i don't think it's out til april but yeah. same difference.

the guy who directed it also made this, which is ok, has its moments.

but from what i've read the movie ditched the most interesting parts of the book's monster, which would make it a less creepy and entertaining monster. at least they got the verb 'evolved' in the tagline. (it's about evolution! complexity theory! ...)

the book wrote itself into a corner pretty early and never got out of it

well i think that was the idea. as the book goes along it becomes less about the horror and more about the characters. once you've ascertained the end (which is pretty early) it's about watching it happen, the different ways they all react. it's really about coming to terms with the inevitable, and how badly we do it. which would not be impossible to film, but i don't see how the movie's not going to be mostly about the monster.

ok i saw this today and yeah it doesn't really work. the writing and cast are really not bad, but it's stuck with this basic problem of compressing the book's ruminations into 90 minutes and also the problem of making the scary plants not seem just silly. has its gruesome moments, but not really scary at all.

also the movie makes the "ruins" literal instead of metaphorical. in the book it really refers to human remains, and the archaeological site is not an actual ruin. but i guess if you call a move the ruins, you need to have ruins in it.

I finally saw this last night and really enjoyed it.

Haven't read the book, so I can't comment on that.

But as a film, it has the gratuitous eye candy (bikini clad girls), plenty of squirming evisceration scenes, and a nice sense of impending doom that is not "ruined" ;) by a happy ending.

Not high art, but it certainly delivered everything I hoped for in a rental, without being obnoxious at any point.

I listened to this book on tape while driving around the American southwest and man I thought it sucked. The first few chapters were promising, but then it's strickly vines. Eventually some of those vines speak German. But man it sucked.

Partway through this film now--OK, I guess. The sensible male lead and the German guy are quit elikeable--cast actually not bad, really. And it's nice to see someone reaping the whirlwind for wearing thongs/flipflops. Ooh, they're about to cut off the German's legs. Erk.

book was pretty good, movie was not

And the vines are fundamentally not scary, unfortunately.

yeah. basically the book's really about death, and the movie is just about a scary plant that isn't very scary. best scene is the crazy girl cutting herself to pieces (which, in the book, is a guy -- who first attracts the plant by virtue of the dried semen on his leg...)