Three decades passed between the 10-year-old me being intrigued by the TV ads for The Boogens and actually being able to see the film. I wasn’t disappointed, because the little horror film is pretty solid. I should have expected as much, considering how many images from those 30-second commercials never left my mind. They were exactly as I remembered them.

The opening credits rely the backstory through vintage newspaper front pages: A small town in the Colorado Rockies briefly was a pay-dirt place for mining silver … until the “attacks” happened, and the mines were closed. Years later, they’re reopened, and the dynamite unleashes the Boogens — creatures that look like the evil spawn of a turtle and a giant spider, with tentacles spiked at the end for maximum neck-slashing action.

Although largely unseen until the picture’s end, the monsters take shelter in the basement of a house into which two young, virile hired hands (an extra-randy Jeff Harlan and Xanadu‘s Fred McCarren) move. Girlfriend Anne-Marie Martin (TV’s Sledge Hammer) and her pal Rebecca Balding (Silent Scream) come to visit, bringing along a yappy little dog that’s actually a darn good actor, as far as animals go. That they won’t all last until the end is a given, but how and in what order?

Despite its goofy, ooga-booga title — never spoken by any of the characters — the film takes itself at just the right level of seriousness; it’s not the piece of quick-buck schlock I feared it might be. Director James L. Conway (Hangar 18) tells the story earnestly, making it a welcome respite from the era’s slasher craze. Smarter than you’d think and lagging only in the middle, The Boogens recalls the creature features of yore — perhaps not with class, but definitely with ingenuity that belies its low budget. —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.

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

Buy it at Amazon.