With "The Ruins," my expectations weren’t too high. The trailer sucked, making it look like yet-another teenagers-in-hell flick. Oh, and did I mention it’s about killer plants? But for me, it turned out to be a pleasant surprise the way "The Descent" was. No classic, but it does offer a lot of nasty fun over ninety minutes.

After some dull (sometimes gratuitous) character exposition, "The Ruins" really gets going and doesn’t let up until the credits roll. Six beautiful-but-bland twenty-somethings, on vacation in South America, decide to visit some temple ruins in the deep jungle, only to be trapped atop it by locals who will kill them if they try to come down. And with good reason; the place is crawling with this weird killer ivy that finds its way into the body through open wounds. The premise sounds silly, but it’s deftly handled by first-time director Carter Smith, working from a novel by Scott Smith. Scenes of these plants attacking are kept to a minimum, which actually creates a fair amount of suspense (and the scene in which two people venture into the ruin to retrieve what they think is a ringing cell phone is actually pretty nerve-wracking).

Again, "The Ruins" is no classic, but its well-acted...and bloody as hell. Interestingly, most of the violence and gore are perpetrated by the characters, not the planets, particularly during cringe-inducing sequences involving impromptu surgery and amputation.