This is yet another variation on the "yokels terrorize yuppies" genre which
has experienced a recent upsurge in popularity. This particular one
comes from the foreign sub-genre, which means that it's not about
smart-ass, reckless, and disrespectful yuppie students heading for the
country and getting raped and tortured by toothless inbred yokels from
West Virginia, but is instead about those same characters heading to
remote foreign locales and getting raped and tortured by wealthy
neo-Nazis (the Hostel sub-sub genre) or swarthy, mustachioed,
resentful natives (the Turistas sub-sub genre). Actually in this case
the kids have less trouble with the local people than with the local
flora, which consists mostly of some killer crawling snapdragons which
seem to be a hybrid created by crossing kudzu with Venus flytraps and
then splicing the result with
the plant from Little Shop of Horrors.
The requisite stereotyped yuppies, with an undue sense of American
entitlement, make their
way to some remote and forgotten area to see some Mayan ruins which
have been preserved particularly well and are not listed in any of the
guidebooks.
Little known fun fact: those Mayan pyramids and temples should not
be called "ruins" at all. They are not ruined. They look exactly the
same as when they were built. The expert Mayan architects just created
them that way to give them a retro look, just as we build
faux-Colonial villages. That may sound like modern thinking to you,
but the Mayans were far more advanced than we realize, and we have
much to learn from their ancient wisdom. They already had precise
astronomy, frosted toaster pastries and color TVs when Europeans were
still living in houses made from their own feces.
Anyway ...
It's one of those movies designed to make you squirm. One of the
male students has to have his legs amputated by the others, and one of
the girls has to have the creeping vines removed from inside of her
with some makeshift surgery followed by a scene where a long string of
plants is pulled from her, like an endless string of scarves being
pulled out by a stage magician.
The film offers no explanation for the
strange supernatural plants, nor history of the haunted pyramid, and the kids are not very appealing,
but that is just as well. Considering their fate, the audience is
probably not meant to have an emotional
investment in them. You would watch
this one entirely for the repulsive gross-outs, which are creepy and
original, and not for the plot or characterization. It's a genre film
for those who like their genre films undiluted and uncompromised.
