Young, attractive tourists wind up plant food for malevolent Mexican foliage in The Ruins.

Turistas meets Little Shop of Horrors? Shockingly, no.

As eye-rolling as the premise sounds, and as awful as the trailers make it look, The Ruins is a cut -- or slash, hack and chop, as it were -- above other lowest-common-denominator shockers about victimized vacationers (yes, I mean you, Hostel).

Much like the blood-thirsty vines at the centre of the heart-stopping horticultural horror-fest, this one gets under your skin. For that credit screenwriter Scott Smith, adapting his best seller, and director Carter Smith. If their film is at times revelatory in its repulsiveness, it's also frightfully well-acted and excruciatingly wound.

Jena Malone and Laura Ramsey star as Amy and Stacy, best friends vacationing in Cancun with their boyfriends -- intense med student Jeff (Jonathan Tucker) and affable Eric (Shawn Ashmore).

With their vacation nearing an end, the four 20-somethings are befriended by a German stranger (Joe Anderson), who offers to take them to a secretive archeological dig. After a few succinct scenes establishing character -- Amy is a bit loose, Jeff too uptight -- they embark through barely trodden jungle to what appears to be a grim Mayan temple overrun with flora.

Once there, the filmmakers waste no time getting to the action: The friends are quickly surrounded by gun-toting locals who refuse to let them leave the ruins alive.

At first, they don't know why -- the locals don't speak English -- but come to realize they've stumbled into an ancient quarantine zone of sorts, infected by grotesque greenery that consumes flesh, mimics sounds (even a person's voice, which is admittedly rendered more effectively in the book than the film, for obvious reasons) and crawls, quite literally under your flesh. Rather than risk allowing this ecological infestation to spread, the locals exterminate anyone exposed to the vegetation.

Faced with imminent death -- they barely have enough water to last a day -- and no prospect of escape, the group unravels in an escalating bloodbath of shattered bones, self-mutilation, emergency surgery and psychological collapse. Much of it is gasp-inducing, little of it is for the faint of heart. Yet some of it is also perversely funny -- as when Jeff insists, "Four Americans on vacation don't just disappear!"

Hey, it's a killer plant movie, people, not The Hours.

Just be warned: You may never feel the same way about stepping foot in your garden again.

(This film is rated 14-A)

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