The Ruins (2008).
A group of friends go on a trip to Mexico. They hear about a secret abandoned Mayan temple. Being young thrill-seekers, they set out to explore it.
There's trouble as soon as they get there. The locals are at their heels. Aggressive. Yelling, threatening them with guns and machetes.
It's a good choice on the filmmakers’ part to not include subtitles to what the locals are saying. It serves to make us as scared and confused as the friends are. (I don't know if other versions provided subtitles. The one I saw didn't. By the way, they're speaking a native Mexican language, not Spanish).
Why are the locals mad? What are they yelling about? Is the temple sacred? Is no outsider or even just anybody allowed to go up there?
If the locals were trying to stop them from going into the temple, they failed tremendously. All that display of rage and hostility only served to send the thoroughly intimidated friends right onto it to take refuge.
This is where they meet the real big bad.
What's the dumb concept here?
Killer plants.
Not as in plants that are awesome at being plants, though that does sound like a cool concept; it's as in plants that literally kill.
Dumb as in it would be hard to take a plant as the bad guy seriously. To end its little reign of terror, you'd probably just need to hack it down, or set it on fire, or simply just walk away. It's a plant; what's it gonna do, grow menacingly after you at a deadly speed of 1 centimeter per week?
Unless...the plant is given super-plant powers such as unnatural speed, or maybe the ability to shoot poisonous darts at will. Which, in this case, the vine does have such abilities. Ha! Well, that's convenient. Now we're talking.
Even so, how would a killer vine look like in a movie that tries to take itself seriously? Like a live-action Goosebumps episode? A Jumanji movie?
So something for kids, then? It's still a bit unserious.
How is this one executed perfectly? For starters, I don't think it's perfect, just pretty decent.
The vine is terrifying, for a few reasons.
One, it eats people. Yes, the vine loves animal flesh, humans not an exception. Dead or alive. Clearly an unpicky eater.
Two, any cut of the vine - no matter how small - can slither its way into your flesh through a wound or an orifice and thrive in there like a worm from hell.
It seems to produce some kind of substance that makes its host numb - unable to feel that it is in there -, and, it makes them delirious.
Three, the vine can not only produce sound but perfectly mimic it as well. Uses this to manipulate people.
It can move around fast (otherwise none of this will work). Four, it seems to know when its being watched, or when someone can see it, so it mostly moves in the dark or out of our sight.
And five, like the Cordyceps fungi, it seems to be able to control the actions of its host, to some extent.
The locals have set up camp surrounding the temple and seem to be on guard for when they come down.
The friends are trapped. Given their reception of them, the friends don't exactly think they'll be greeted with warm hugs if they relent.
Plus, it's already a bad sign that none of those locals will put one foot anywhere near the structure.
It doesn't really scare me as much it just thoroughly disgusts me, the vine. It proves itself to be a formidable bad guy, however.
I read a good theory that says the locals weren't trying to scare the friends away; they were trying to force them onto the temple and keep them there, giving enough time to the vine to feast as it pleases.
Maybe they are not necessarily scared of it; maybe they are its caretakers, ensuring that everyone but their own people keeps its hunger sated. It could be anything from a pet to a god to them.
Still, the fact that the vine can live in a person and perhaps thrive elsewhere - wherever that person goes to - suggests the locals were trying to stop it from spreading this way.
Perhaps they were trying to save everybody else all along, and keep the vine restricted to the temple.
