Ruin Me (2017)

SEPTEMBER 7, 2020

GENRE: SLASHER
SOURCE: STREAMING (SHUDDER)

Having seen a few now, the "horror fans take part in a staged horror thing that turns out to be real" sub-sub genre has never produced any true knockouts that I can recall; the likes of Mimesis, Blood Fest, Haunt, etc are enjoyable enough but lack that extra bit of oomph that keeps them from being anything I would highly recommend. And now we can add Ruin Me to that group; the film isn't bad at all, but I kept waiting for it to kick into a higher gear than what it was offering. And to be fair, it did, but only in its final scene, which is, obviously, too late to change its status from "Yeah it was OK."

It starts off promisingly, and the plot was fine - a group of six strangers (two couples, two lone dudes) take part in a "Slasher Sleepout", where they're taken into the woods and menaced by a typical backwoods slasher type, having to solve puzzles in order to stay ahead of him and... win, I guess? Part of the problem is that the game is hazily described with unclear rules, so I was never sure if people were supposed to be offed or if it was more like an escape room setup where the group had to work together and win as a unit. Seems like having a bunch of strangers get together to solve puzzles as the "body count" rises would be a fine way to set up a whodunit slasher (with one person knowing they're the killer) and leave clues around to help them figure out who it was, but instead they have this confusing mix of slasher and adventure game puzzle solving that never really complement each other.

The thing they miss is that part of the fun should be trying to solve the puzzles along with them, and that seems impossible since they are so abstract (and honestly, probably wouldn't be solved by a group of newcomers as quickly as they are). For example, the very first one they come across has them find a random word on a board, then they figure out that they need to look at three trees from a precise angle to form words out of the various letters imprinted on them and adding the sound "tree" into the middle (so like there would be a S on one tree and a T on the other, so add "tree" to get "STREET" - not a real example, the movie's versions are all five dollar vocabulary words). Each word had a number on it, and the one they needed was of course a synonym for the word they found earlier - that word's number would open a combination lock elsewhere. Later, a puzzle is only solved by chance because one character happened to pee next to the tree that held the clue, as there was no other marker for them. Later they just go full blown Saw and force someone to risk drowning by attaching a length of chain to a block at the bottom of the ocean, so that one person has to be fully submerged in order to give the other enough slack on their tether to reach the key, which is further inland.

Expert I am not, but I've done enough escape rooms to be baffled at the idea of being asked to do these kind of things. See, for such a plot to really work, one has to easily imagine how things happen when the game (established as running for a bit, it's not a "grand opening" or whatever) is operating smoothly, so we can see how things are going off the rails. Here, I was never even sure how the game worked at all, so when something goes awry I was held at arm's length, wondering if that was supposed to happen. And that'd be fine if the characters weren't either, but they have veteran players in the mix! The two obligatory gothy horror fans who are obsessed with gore and laugh at the idea of people watching normal movies (you know, the type that only exist in movies featuring horror fans; pretty much all of the ones I know have well rounded tastes in cinema) are playing again because they didn't win last time, and get angry at the main girl when she solves a puzzle because... it ruins their chances, I guess? Is it like a Weakest Link kind of scenario where the gamemasters will come and kill off the players who aren't contributing to deciphering their complicated nonsense puzzles?

Now as far as the slasher element goes, well, unfortunately everything has to be plausibly waved away as part of the game, which means it's not particularly satisfying. One thing I really loved about Hell Fest, which has some of that "they wanted horror experience and now they have it" flair (but set against a normally functioning amusement park where only our handful of leads are in danger) is that they make it abundantly clear with the first kill that this is not staged, allowing us to settle into the reality and enjoy the slasher mayhem for precisely what it is. Here we are always kept wondering, distracting away from the scares and suspense - as do the characters themselves. At one point a character is killed (or "killed") in plain sight of the others, and they stand there wondering if it's real. If they're not scared, why should I be?

So it's not scary, but... well, it's not a particularly funny movie, either. There's a virginal Randy type guy who contributes the occasional chuckle but otherwise it's free of levity of any sort. Our lead is a recovering (or... still?) addict with some secrets to hide from her boyfriend, the two goth people are always angry, and the other lone guy is practically mute - not exactly a wacky group of folks who can be counted on to get us through this situation with some humor (which kept Blood Fest afloat despite suffering from some of these same issues). To be fair, the film's climax, where the lead's secrets come out, are pretty dark and upsetting, so the tonal shift would be jarring if we were laughing up until then, but a more gradual decline into that territory instead of basically starting there wouldn't have been the worst thing.

Nevertheless, if you're not too concerned with that sort of thing and just want a timekiller, it's, as I said, "OK." I didn't recognize any of the actors, which is always a plus, and given the obsession with modern trappings in recent genre films, it was kind of refreshing to watch a bunch of people run around in the woods again. Apart from some expected bickering the group gets along fairly well for a bunch of strangers, so while the two goth people annoyed me personally I didn't hate spending time with the cast in general the way I do with some other motley crews of this type. And, again (and without spoiling things) the ending kind of makes it all worthwhile, not only because of its bravado, but also because it could have easily veered into bad twist territory that we've seen before (specific examples would spoil things, but in this movie's honor I hid a hard to find clue somewhere in the review!) and refrained, keeping it grounded. I appreciate that.

What say you?

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