RUIN ME

. 2017/88m

“They paid to be scared. They didn’t know how much it would cost them.”

Director/Writer: Preston DeFrancis / Writer: Trysta A. Bissett / Cast: Marcienne Dwyer, Matt Dellapina, Chris Hill, Eva Hamilton, John Odom, Sam Ashdown, Cameron Gordon.

Body Count: 8 …or 2?

Alexandra replaces her boyfriend Nathan’s sick friend on a weekend immersive horror experience – Slasher Sleepout – which aims to plonk a group of patrons into a horror situation, firing clues their way and generally trying to scare the pants off of them.

Naturally, this being a slasher film, things that they take to be a gag soon transpire to be very real. Or do they?

Inexperienced and recently out of rehab, Alex feels hugely out of place, but soon proves to be adept at solving the puzzles that show up along the way. Also along for the fun are goth escape room loving couple Pitch and Marina, geeky Larry, and Tim, who barely says a word. Various extras run around and try to frighten them, but when Alex finds a body in a tree (that has predictably disappeared as soon as someone else comes to her aid), she starts to believe it might not be a game.

Ruin Me tiptoes along this ambiguous line for the rest of its runtime – a Saw-like trap involving people tethered together on a wire that goes into the water while dragging someone else towards a tray-thing of spikes seems to convince us it’s all set up around Alex’s druggy history. But then it isn’t. But then it is again. Oyyy.

Despite fairly convincingly confusing us at each turn, there’s a very obvious outcome involving one particular character, which seemed inevitable from the start. Up to you.