It will ruin an hour and a half of your day. “The Ruins” is supposed to be a horror film. It had a lot of gore but that’s about it. Even through the gore, the audience couldn’t stop laughing-probably because of the stupidity of it all. The film is not worth watching on the big screen. It’s probably not worth watching when it comes out on DVD either. Actually, don’t watch it at all-even if it’s free. Of course, now your interest is piqued and you’re going to watch it just to see what’s so stupid about it.

The film follows two American couples vacationing in Mexico. On their last day, they decide to go visit an ancient Mayan ruin that is not listed on the map with a couple of other guys. They hike up to it and as soon as they get there people who look Hispanic but don’t speak Spanish show up on horses and start yelling at the bunch. The film never tells you who those people are and what they’re doing there.

Like most horror films, there’s that one girl who has no common sense and has a syndrome of falling down and crying. Jena Malone (Stepmom) got the unfortunate part of playing Amy. She’s a photographer and as the “Hispanic” people are yelling at them and waving their weapons, she’s clicking away on her camera. As she backs up to get a good shot, she steps into some plants that look a lot like marijuana. The “Hispanics” freak out and shoot one of the guys that went on the hike with them. She then falls down and starts crying as everyone else starts running.

The actors in the film could have been better, although they did do a great job of being bloody and cutting one another up. The best actors in the world couldn’t make the story line any better anyway. Shawn Ashmore who plays Iceman in “X-Men” should stick to Iceman. He played Eric, one of the boyfriends. He didn’t have a single good line. Laura Ramsey (She’s The Man) played Stacy, Eric’s girlfriend. She was great at being psycho. She starts losing her mind after getting a cut in the knee. Plants start growing inside of her and she cuts herself up. Nowhere in the film does it explain the significance of the plants, why they’re alive and why they want to kill people.

The film is rated “R” for its gore. Other than that, it’s quite comical. At the end, the audience was asking, “So, weed killed them?”

The funniest line of the movie was when Jeff, played by Jonathan Tucker (“The Black Donnellys”) says, “Four Americans who are on vacation just don’t disappear.” The audience burst into laughter. It probably wasn’t meant to be funny but it was so pathetic one just had to laugh. Apparently, the screenwriters for this film don’t watch the news much.

Typhani Yang can be reached at [email protected]