The Ruins
This is the worst episode of The Twilight Zone (the killer plants), upgraded to a watchable infection-based horror film. A nice first outing.
Young and restless middle class kids are chilling in Acapulco when an opportunity for a visit to an archaeological digsite comes up. They form two couples, the hotties and the nerds. They get there, somehow, the indigenous people herd them to the pyramid top and keep them there. Gruesome things happen to all of them in time.
I’m guessing this is a cliché now, but reversed: the Final Girl did get wasted and nearly cheated on her boyfriend (the modern equivalent to sex out of wedlock). No matter, because all others die, and she goes on to infect the world.
Jena Malone escapes to a brighter future in Refn pictures, while all other wither into obscurity.
Now that a pandemic has jumped from pages of books (fact or fiction) into out lives, I realise most horror films of this kind do speak of individual actions that completely destroy the collective work to keep the disease from spreading. They are usually very pessimistic, the disease has human-level intelligence and cannot be stopped. Selfish actions only make it worse, but it’s hopeless anyway. The important part is that the sick are still human, until the bitter end.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.