Twice a year, you’re supposed to spread pre-emergent fertilizer on your lawn to prevent weeds from ever popping up. Someone should have done the same to The Ruins, a terrible killer-vines horror flick based upon Scott Smith’s not-at-all-terrible 2006 novel of the same name.

Two couples of college kids vacationing in Mexico meet a charismatic German guy who needs help finding his brother, from whom he’s heard no word since venturing out on a trip to check out some ancient ruins in the nearby jungle. Somehow, this seems like a viable alternative to another day of drinking and doing it, so our quartet of all-American students agrees to help the complete stranger out.

Bad move. No sooner do they arrive on the site — which looks like a stair-step stone temple — than locals speaking a foreign tongue shoot one of their new friend’s friends, via an arrow to the heart and a bullet through the nose. This drives our imperiled heroes and heroines to the top of the site, where they’re imprisoned by the growing armed throng below. Then there’s the matter of the ruins’ plant life: It’s, like, alive, dude. And it eats people by burrowing into their skin and moving around. With precious little food or water and seemingly no hope to get through the human gauntlet below, the collegians’ future doesn’t look so rosy.

It’s hard to fathom why The Ruins is as bad as it is, since Smith (A Simple Plan) is also responsible for the screenplay. It’s simply boring, which is weird, because what played out as gripping over 336 pages seems an absolutely tedious uphill climb at just 93 minutes. Part of the reason may be we’re given no insight into who the characters are, so we don’t really care about what happens to them. We know they like to pound back the booze, and that’s about it; they’re ciphers.

If anything, the movie deserves a bravery badge for not diluting the shock moments of the novel — most notably, an impromptu double amputation in grisly detail — but it chickens out of presenting the book’s chilling ending, going for one of those insipid Hollywood “gotcha” moments — the cinematic equivalent to a middle finger hoisted toward the audience. —Rod Lott

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When the Canadian horror film Ghostkeeper first hit U.S. home video, the box art depicted some sort of demon chicken that, naturally, isn’t anywhere to be found. I cry fowl — er, foul — on the title, too, because Ghostkeeper also has no real ghost.

It does have a genuine keeper in the first scene, however: a shopkeeper whom our lead characters derisively call “Gramps,” yet he warns them of an oncoming storm anyway. Those young people who should know better are three snowmobilers out having New Year’s fun. Per the “Surf City” rule, there are two girls for every boy, and the dumber of the females says, “How can mountains be dangerous? They’re so beautiful.” (Later, she relates that one time in 10th grade where she indulged in her prostitution fantasy.)

Making their way through the powder, they have to climb up to a seemingly abandoned lodge for shelter. Per all ’80s fright flicks, two clichés occur quickly: A cat jumps out of nowhere, and the smarter woman (Riva Spier, Rabid) says, “I think there’s somebody else here.” She’s right! It’s an old woman with stringy hair and a perpetual frown (Georgie Collins, TV’s Lonesome Dove: The Series). She lives there with her son and a “windigo”; the latter resides in the basement, but both kill people for a hobby.

In this case, the evil is more a supernatural force than a bloodthirsty creature, but you’ll hardly notice, because next to nothing happens. Snowy locales can make excellent settings for scary movies — see: The Shining — but scenery is all this pile of Canuck crap has going for it. I’m all for slow-burners, but Ghostkeeper is just a slow-starter that never reaches a modicum of momentum, and there’s a huge difference. —Rod Lott

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Given all that bank made by Halloween and Friday the 13th, the immortal Cannon Films wanted to get in on some of that calendar-slasher action, making its stake on the holiday of hollow resolutions with the punny but cannily titled New Year’s Evil.

It’s Dec. 31 in Los Angeles, and the big show is the New Wave New Year’s countdown, Hollywood Hotline, staged at a hotel and hosted by Blaze, a supposed punk-rock diva played by a blah Roz Kelly (aka Pinky Tuscadero of TV’s Happy Days). The live show gets off to a grand start when a caller identifying himself as “Evil” says he’s going to kill someone when the clock strikes midnight at each of the contiguous United States’ four time zones, culminating in Blaze’s death.

What makes New Year’s Evil different from many slashers is that after the prologue, director Emmett Alston (9 Deaths of the Ninja) makes no effort to hide the identity of the killer. Evil’s played by Kip Niven (Magnum Force), he of the feathered hair, Fila track suit, occasional Bob Hope-esque mask and mobile tape recorder, which he calls a “miracle of modern technology.” Using a variety of disguises and pick-up lines (“There’s a big party up at Erik Estrada’s place”), he finds a woman or two to slay every hour, on the hour. “Auld Lang Syne,” bitches!

Among Evil’s victims are a nurse (Taafee O’Connell, Galaxy of Terror), a bar-hopping dumb blonde who discusses diarrhea (Louisa Moritz, The Last American Virgin) and a young Teri Copley (Brain Donors), whom he catches mid-makeout at the drive-in. The film’s “twist” is startlingly obvious to anyone who pays attention the overacting of Blaze’s sad-sack son (Grant Cramer, Hardbodies) in the early scenes, and Alston has one scare scene up his sleeve that I bet worked wonders in theaters. Regardless, Niven’s multifaceted performance is such a mad gas, it makes the movie well worth watching. —Rod Lott

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Single mom Carla Moran (Barbara Hershey) has a problem: She can’t type worth a flip, and if only she could, she could make a better life for herself and her three children.

Wait, make that two problems, because she keeps getting raped in her rental home by a ghost. And Lord knows Mavis Beacon can’t do anything about that.

I suspect more people know about The Entity than actually have seen it. At my middle school, it was the talk of the lunch table, but the only friend who saw it was the one whose parents had split up. (She didn’t care what he watched; hell, she even let him eat marijuana brownies she made.) To the rest of us, The Entity didn’t sound possible: “How did they make her boob move like it was being squeezed if no one was there?”

To be fair, the sexual assaults are just part of the multifaceted film from Sidney J. Furie (Superman IV: The Quest for Peace), but they’re a large part, and why the movie remains remembered today. (Having the soundtrack drill an aggro-metal riff into your brain every time the malevolent force attacks tends to have a lasting effect.) But the poltergeist activity also grows to include flashes of weird-science electricity and little lasers that go pew-pew-pew like a vintage video game. The parapsychologists who arrive to help her are a trio later semi-parodied in 2011’s Insidious, in which Hershey played the mother of the haunted.

Not that I’m defending the ghost’s actions in any way, but Hershey is a very beautiful woman; The Entity makes me feel a tad ashamed for finding her attractive since I hit puberty. She gives a believable performance of a desperate woman no one else believes, but Furie does her no favors by allowing the screenplay by Audrey Rose‘s Frank De Felitta (based on his novel, based on “true” events) to go on as long it does: more than two hours. For chrissake, Sid, it’s a horny spirit horror thriller, not a Revolutionary War epic. —Rod Lott

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Arriving at the tail end of the Grudge/Ring string of Japanese-to-American horror films was One Missed Call, a Hollywood remake of a 2003 Asian film of the same name. By then, no one cared. They didn’t miss a thing.

The premise is that a college student receives a cellphone voicemail from his or her near-future self dying. (It even comes with its own ringtone!) Luckily, it’s stamped with the date and time, so he or she knows exactly how much time’s left on the clock. Then, as the imminent moment approaches, hallucinations of centipedes and Joker-faced people kick in. Death occurs, a piece of hard candy pops out of the corpse’s mouth (like a parting gift?), and someone in the freshly deceased’s contact list gets the next call.

So, yeah, it’s Final Destination with a family plan.

Since psych student Beth (Shannyn Sossamon, A Knight’s Tale) is rapidly losing friends to this accursed cellular scam, she teams up with a police detective (ol’ sandpaper throat Ed Burns, A Sound of Thunder) who lost his own sister in the same way to solve the mystery before they, too, get One Missed Call.

The characters in this stupid movie are stupid, so at least consistency is in place. In an effort to stay alive, they remove their batteries and they smash their devices. In fact, they do everything but the obvious: Cancel their contract or, if their carrier prohibited such a thing, change their damn phone number.

Equally dumb in French director Eric Valette’s film is the expected not-an-ending ending, which counted upon it being successful enough to merit sequels, as the Japanese original did. I, for one, am glad the Call was terminated here. —Rod Lott

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