Jason Adams reads my mind and posts about the bizarre reaction to The Ruins by all of Ain’t It Cool News’s reviewers. (Thanks for saving me the work, man!) Basically, they all loved it, but they were all totally stunned by this because they assumed it would suck. I’ve seen similar bafflement about the movie expressed on some of the big horror sites–statements like “I just have to know what the hell is going on. Hopefully I won’t be disappointed when all is revealed.” If only it were based on an acclaimed novel available at your local library!

My friend Jim Treacher wrote me to say he was nervous that the studio wasn’t screening the movie for critics. But can you blame them? If the CW among genre-centric reviewers, who really ought to know better, was that it was gonna stink, what do you think your average mainstream-media critic would make of it? After all, it’s about violent and horrible things happening to attractive young people–unless you can cobble together a metaphor for the Bush Administration’s treatment of Latin America out of it, it must be garbage, right?

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