RUIN ME (2017)

Studio:       Shudder
Director:    Preston DeFrancis
Writer:       Trysta A. Bissett, Preston DeFrancis
Producer:  Rebecca G. Stone
Stars:     Marcienne Dwyer, Matt Dellapina, Eva Hamilton, John Odom, Chris Hill, Cameron Gordon, Sam Ashdown, Rocky Rector, Tom Harryman, Alex Galick

Review Score:

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Summary:

Participants in a horror-themed escape room campout come to suspect they may actually be targets for murderous asylum escapees.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

When his friend Graham drops out, Nathan invites his girlfriend Alex to join him at ‘Slasher Sleepout,’ a horror-themed extreme haunt escape room in the woods that takes place over 36 hours. At the pickup site, Alex and Nathan meet fellow participants Larry, Tim, and goth couple Marina and Pitch. After The Host explains the rules, the six players are hooded, thrown in a van, and dropped off in a forest alone.

Inside a dumpster, everyone finds individual backpacks containing a special item for each person. Nathan shows Alex that he received a key, which he wears as a necklace without telling anyone else. Larry finds a newspaper article reporting on escaped asylum inmates supposedly loose in the area. The group begins working to solve game-related puzzles.

After darkness falls, masked men chase the players to their campsite, where they rest for the night. Alex and Nathan have an awkward conversation about their relationship. A deranged hobo surprises the group and unexpectedly slashes Nathan’s arm before fleeing. Alarmed by the authentic violence, Alex moves to use the safe word to end her game, but Nathan stops her.

In the morning, the others discover that Tim is missing. Fingers nailed to a board point the remaining players in different directions to find their next clues. Paired together, Alex confides in Marina that she is a recovering drug addict, and met Nathan when he was her therapist in rehab.

Left alone, Alex discovers Tim’s bloody body suspended in a tree. Alex rushes to tell the others, but Tim’s body is gone when they return. The others begin suspecting that Alex may be mentally unstable.

When her constant flirtation leads him to suspect she slept with Larry, Pitch pulls a gun, which was in one of the backpacks, on his girlfriend Marina. The hobo interrupts by slitting Pitch’s throat. Marina runs off in a panic and seemingly dies too.

Larry reveals that he hid a cellphone in his sock. Larry tries calling 911. A disguised voice calls back demanding that Larry destroy the phone. When Larry is slow to act, a sniper’s bullet seemingly takes him down. The voice on the phone says, “Alex, I know everything.” Alex is captured and knocked unconscious.

Alex wakes on a beach to find her ankle shackled to a cable leading into the water. Nearby, Alex finds Jared, the junkie who saved her life when she overdosed and with whom she also had an affair, dazed and similarly shackled. After discovering that the same cable connects them, Alex swims into the water to find that their cable loops through an immobile cement block, preventing either of them from moving too far without the other person potentially drowning.

Alex and Jared notice a key on a nearby pole. Jared volunteers to hold his breath underwater while Alex retrieves it. The key becomes stuck in Alex’s ankle lock. Alex sees that the key is attached to Nathan, who is bound in a makeshift straightjacket atop a nearby hill. Alex is forced to pull Nathan down onto a spike trap in order to get back to the water to save Jared. However, Alex discovers that Jared is no longer there.

Alex returns to Nathan and helps pull his injured leg off of the spikes. Alex doesn’t mention Jared. Alex finds that the key around Nathan’s neck fits a hidden keyhole on her shackle and she finally frees herself.

Worried about her mental stability, Nathan insists for a second time that Alex take one of her pills, even though they are antidepressants, not antipsychotics. Nathan confesses that his friend Graham wasn’t actually sick. Rather, Nathan wanted to take Alex on this excursion because he was worried she would relapse and he didn’t want to leave her alone.

Back in the forest, a hand pulls Nathan underground and he seemingly dies. A masked man in a hospital gown chases Alex. Alex disguises herself as a second masked man in order to get the jump on the person pursuing her. Alex attacks and unmasks the man as a skinny kid, who insists everything is part of the game and she is unhinged. Following another fight, Alex recovers the gun and shoots the skinny kid.

A cop shows up and confronts Alex at gunpoint for being covered in a bloody hospital gown. Alex seemingly wonders if she might in fact be an escaped mental patient hallucinating her experience. While Alex is patted down, the hobo kills the cop.

Alex runs into the woods, finds a building, and enters to discover it is a bar. All of the other participants from Slasher Sleepout welcome Alex, confirming it was only a game after all. Pitch and Marina explain that they were recruited by the operators after they failed their individual games. Larry admits he was a plant all along. Nathan claims he didn’t know it was a setup until his apparent death. A band plays as the group celebrates. However, Alex notices Jared isn’t there.

On their drive home, Nathan and Alex stop at an old gas station so Nathan can use the restroom. Alex calls Jared’s cellphone and hears it ringing in Nathan’s trunk. Alex opens the trunk to find Jared held captive inside.

Nathan angrily confronts Alex about her lies. Nathan forces Alex to admit that her pills are really oxy and she is still an addict. Nathan confesses that his friend Graham actually owns Slasher Sleepout and he used the entire setup to prove his devotion to Alex. Claiming that he is trying to save her, Nathan asks Alex to prove her choice to be with him by stabbing Jared. When she doesn’t, Nathan kills Jared.

Nathan gets on top of Alex to choke her. Alex stabs Nathan in his neck with her sobriety necklace. She then repeatedly stabs Nathan to death in a fit of frustrated rage.

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Review:

Extreme haunt ‘Blackout’ by way of the overnight immersion of ‘Great Horror Campout’ is the central conceit of ‘Slasher Sleepout’ (that’s a lot of ‘outs’), a 36-hour escape room event set in a forest.  Alex couldn’t care less about horror-themed entertainment, particularly the interactive kind.  Her favorite movie is “Dirty Dancing,” after all.  But when her boyfriend’s buddy drops out at the last minute, Alex upturns her palms with a “why not?” to join Nathan on this weird woodland excursion.

Accompanied by oversexed goth girl Marina, her Hot Topic beau Pitch, schlubby chatterbox Larry, and plain bagel Tim, the latter of whom loses out on a personality when the script runs out of stereotypes, the sextet is hooded, abducted, and dumped at the starting point with only game-provided backpack contents as accessories.  Puzzles are pondered.  Personalities clash.  Then a hobo unexpectedly interrupts the curious camping trip to cut Nathan’s arm, leading everyone to suspect the game’s story about crazed asylum escapees may not be as fictional as they thought.

As the weekend rolls on, more encounters erupt in bloodshed.  Once bodies begin disappearing, the line between fact and fantasy disappears too.  ‘Slasher Sleepout’ eventually takes everyone so deep, Alex can no longer be certain if anything at all is real, or just a haunting hallucination in her head.

“Ruin Me,” a title I’m tempted to not even use because I’m certain its eventual distributor will correctly insist on renaming it “Slasher Sleepout,” clearly pulls its plot from the same mind game maze as “The Unraveling” (review here), “April Fool’s Day,” and David Fincher’s “The Game.”  Although “Ruin Me” faithfully follows a bunch of the same setups as those movies, it makes its mark by taking two memorable turns, giving its take on the “what’s really going on?” premise a sharper bite than most.

The first turn isn’t quite a twist, but an intentionally disorienting mid-movie reset certain to force any viewer who thinks s/he has it all figured out to immediately reconsider.  “Ruin Me” jumps suddenly from trees to the beach for a deviously devised setpiece that would compel Jigsaw to give it a golf clap.  This harrowing sequence creatively changes the context of Alex’s predicament, as well as her relationships with several key characters, setting up a finish line sprint filled with a few more suspenseful surprises.

On the other side of that coin, serious stake flips like these are what give the film the trouble it has balancing horror with humor.  Co-writers Preston DeFrancis, who also directs, and Trysta A. Bissett have a broader background in comedy, evidenced by how hard the first third of the film fights to be funny.  If accompanying music only incorporated buoyant slide whistles and trumpet plungers, “Ruin Me’s” opening could sell itself straight as a farcical spoof.

Iffy tone becomes an issue “Ruin Me” gets only a slippery grip on, particularly because the movie ends up in several unexpectedly dark places.  Working harder than anyone to balance this uneven seesaw is lead actress Marcienne Dwyer.  Alex comes out the other end of her experience as a much different person than when she went in, for a multitude of reasons shaping her evolution throughout.  Dwyer’s organic ability to pull back old layers to expose new traits almost singlehandedly rescues “Ruin Me” when it teeters toward un-believability, which its concept can’t completely avoid anyway.

Her costars can’t compete with her characterization, though that’s more on the script than it is on the actors.  Chris Hill’s Larry, a dead ringer for David Anthony Higgins (a ‘That Guy’ you’ll probably have to Google), is funny in principle as a personality, but his material often lands flat.  A line about how “reviews on Fangoria said (Slasher Sleepout) is the best,” a reference already dated in 2017, hints at how dialogue is a touch out of step with current culture.  Punch out comparable misfires, punch up conversations, and “Ruin Me” would have more zip on its lip.

I’m inclined to wave a hand at drawbacks in the drama however, and award extra points on the basis that “Ruin Me” makes up for rough-edged shortcomings with entertaining enthusiasm.  A standard scale might see a lower score due to a slightly forced conclusion that goes on too long, or the persistent thorn of an uneven tempo.

But you’ll virtually never see a micro movie out of Michigan aim this high for slick styling on a low budget and nearly get all the way there.  Days, nights, exteriors, interiors, and even underwater shots, “Ruin Me” packs all that it can into its story, staging, performances, and technical execution.  “Ruin Me” may not make it to the top of the heap of humorous horror thrillers, but it does climb high as an admirable indie effort.

Review Score:  70

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