User Reviews

Straight to the point: Chernobyl Diaries has some of the worst acting/script/motivations I have seen in a movie, along with incredibly predictable 'scares'. YET, it has probably the best untapped location of any horror.

From the offset, you're introduced to some 'cool' kids who'll annoy the hell out of you immediately. Nothing is believable, none of the characters connect with you or each other. I hated the characters so much I was literally waiting for them to be lynched by the monsters. The only characters/actors I appreciated was a tour guy who takes them to Chernobyl and a hippie Australian who tags along with his hollow girlfriend.

Not surprising (and this was the reason I went to see the movie) was the fact the movie improved ten-fold when they arrive in Chernobyl. The location is astonishingly eerie and you can easily believe the myths of mutants living there. Here the film actually becomes scary to some extent and you feel yourself tensing up.

Until of course, the actors interrupt your concentration with some appalling, predictable stuff.

And so the finale winds down with your typical 'running blindly (literally at the very end), being chased by hordes of evil freaks'. And characters don't die so much as get whisked away into the darkness. Whenever the movie builds up to something scary, it's always undone by a disappointing result, leaving you a little bit deflated each time.

So that's what I thought. I would love to recommend this film for the location alone, but I could never, ever, recommend you see this film for anything else.

Bradley Parker's Chernobyl Diaries kicks off with a happy-go-lucky montage of American Euro-trippers goofing around to Supergrass's "Alright." It's a sequence you'd even groan about if your good friends whipped it together on iMovie. The video diary aspect of the film's title is established here, and soon after the overconfident douchey horror cliché, Paul (Jonathan Sadowski)charms (?) his brother's two friends into joining an "extreme tour" into Pripyat.

Haven't heard of Pripyat or Chernobyl? The writers were thinking of you (Paul: "Who here's heard of Chernobyl?" Natalie: "Isn't that where the nuclear disaster happened?"). I couldn't decide if Natalie was being written as a horror ditz (she wasn't) or if the expositional writing was beyond awful (probably). However, in retrospect, I wonder how many teens in the audience actually need Chernobyl explained to them? Near the end of the film, when two of the protagonists find themselves inside the ghostly ruins of the nuclear plant, the audience is let in on some important information: "We need to get out of here before the radiation kills us." This is good advice, seeing as their faces are melting. I wonder how convincing nuclear lobbyists have been at hiding the dangers of being near radiation.

I'm still trying to figure out why this film was made. The eerie presence of off-limit radiation zones has been masterfully handled in Tarkofvki's Stalker, which shouldn't even be mentioned next to this stinker. The tension between characters doesn't grow beyond "You're never there for me as a brother" and falls miles short of the complex relationships in Neil Marshall's spelunking survival-horror The Descent. John Boorman's Deliverance marks a more nuanced look at extreme tourism, where city slickers want to raft down an isolated river system before the whole area is flooded by new dams. The antagonists of the film are the locals who don't take kindly to cocky outsiders, and yet have no way of knowing that they will be displaced or drowned (see Up the Yangtze for a non-fiction displacement situation in China).

The closest Chernobyl Diaries comes to anything beyond a Ukrainian The Hills Have Eyes, is the attempt at portraying a conflicted character in Uri, the tour guide. He is old enough to have lived through the disaster, as well as the shifting political landscape, and as an ex-soldier he establishes his tour company because of what seems like limited financial options. The film hints at Uri knowing about the hidden radiation victims around Pripyat, and yet, while the tourists mess around in the abandoned homes, the big soldier has tears in his eyes. He also includes an abandoned carnival on the tour, alluding to a May Day celebration that never happened. Uri clearly feels for the workers whose lives were destroyed by the meltdown, and yet shows very little malice for the disrespectful brats he guides around. However, because he is the most physically capable, and possesses crucial knowledge of the place, he is of course the first to die. Keeping Uri alive would have resulted in a much more interesting film.

The writers were clearly not interested in investigating in any thoughtful issues. If the argument is going to be made that this is a horror film and is only produced to scare you, I'd suggest you pay your friends a dollar to jump out at you a number of times throughout the day. Excellent horror films are more than a popped paper bag. If we've forgotten about nuclear dangers (even amongst the recent Fukushima disaster), have we also forgotten how to haunt? None of the bumps-in-the-night were as chilling as the sick feeling caused by the depiction of radiation poisoning near the end of the film, and even this haunting feeling is tossed out the window for one final scare which shifts all the blame from Western tourists to the big-bad-probably-still-our-enemy-generic-Eastern-European-government. The thesis of the film seems to be "stay out of dangerous countries that can't even take care of their own issues." I remember looking through one of my dad's National Geographic magazines on Chernobyl and being horrified by the children born with major health problems and missing limbs. The image is still frozen in my mind. I'm not morally upset that the filmmakers turned these children into ravenous killer mutants, but I am disappointed at the wasted potential Chernobyl offered the filmmakers. Again, the film could have used Uri's heart.

There are 439 operating nuclear power plants in the world today, and that leaves me uneasy. This movie only leaves me uneasy about the state of film. It's as though Chernobyl Diaries was produced by a pro-nuclear committee: blame is shifted elsewhere, and the whole thing is easily forgettable. Cue the Supergrass.

BY D.P. Clark (a writer based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada)

I am a fan of the Paranormal Activity franchise; and I also own a copy of Paranormal Entity - a rip off from the original I had the guilty pleasure of actually enjoying. I was surprised to see the writer of P.A. and the rip off P.E. working together to make Chernobyl Diaries. So ignoring the bad reviews (and my better judgment) I took a chance to see if the movie would live up to it's potential.

Like a lot of people, I thought the trailer looked interesting and thought it had good potential. The problem is, the movie is just an extended version of the trailer. There is nothing else to expect from it. Cliché characters and a cliché set of monsters that were ripped from the Hills Have Eyes. There's really no plot either, what you see in the trailer is exactly what you get. An hour and a half of trailer.

Several parts made no sense, either. Such as:

1. The group of people were there at least a day and a half - yet nobody complained about being hungry or thirsty. If I were scared, running around, breathing hard; I would have the nastiest case of cotton mouth. Yet they all seem appear and act well nourished and hydrated. The story starts out as a day trip, yet nobody could be bothered to pack a cooler for lunch. Doh!

2. There's a scene where a bear surprises them, but runs right by as if it doesn't see anyone. Nobody gets cornered, mauled, or put in danger in any way. It just runs by them and they leave the building like someone farted rather than being in mortal danger.

3. The "monsters" in this movie are simply people who have been the victims of secret experiments of a nature undisclosed to the audience. So like any 1950s b-rated horror movie, we're supposed to take it on faith that simply because they are mutated humans; they are by their nature are irrational, murderous, and cannibalistic. Logic would deduce that being kept in a lab all your life would give you a taste for cardboard pizza, not human flesh.

4. We never get to see what they actually look like. All they are is a blur of pale bald heads and dark uniforms. Now, I am all for the "Less is more" approach to FX; but it would have been nice to see a scene where they stumble on a dead one so the audience can get a good look at exactly what the protagonists are dealing with. I left the movie theater feeling ripped off because I could barely see what the characters were running from all that time.

5. Stereotyping sucks. The portrayal of Slavic people as rough speaking brutes is annoying and insulting. The portrayal of young women as carefree partiers from Girls Gone Wild is annoying and insulting. It's been done to death in every freaking horror movie since god knows when. Give it a rest already.

6. Yuri seems to know more than what he's letting on, yet there is no twist to his character. I half expected to see him pop up later in the movie (until they found his body, that is) and expose himself as an agent in the entire mess. That at least, would have been *something* to break up the monotony.

In conclusion, this movie wasted it's own potential. The tricks that worked in the Paranormal Activity/Paranormal Entity movies do not work here. It works for a ghost, or a demon, but not a flesh and blood menace. I give this a 3 for competent acting and for a fast moving plot that at least doesn't *feel* like a complete waste of time (even though it is).

As an avid horror movie fan, I'll admit that it impresses me when a film is able to make me actually pause breathing for a split second, or make me clench back in my seat. I give credit to this film for being able to do it twice, which is more than I can say for Paranormal Activity, The Hills have Eyes etc. With that being said, the story did focus on a part of history which I'm very much interested in and this might mean I've rated the film more highly than people who came to see a general horror flick.

The film centres around a bunch of people illegally going to Chernobyl to explore the area affected by the nuclear disaster, before things go drastically wrong and the tried and tested system of people being plucked away is in motion. The film benefits from being mostly in darkness as it helps the jumpy aspects of some of the shock-moments, as well as the eerie music and camera-work which kept me on my toes throughout. As with most horror films, the major failure of this for me was to produce a storyline past the generic "people get attacked/killed by a mysterious thing(s)", instead following the trend and making me struggle to care about who died. The one thing I will comment on is that there is a good swerve at the end of the film which will throw you off guard, but by then you've already seen too much destruction and any hope of a happy ending is virtually impossible.

If this film had lasted twenty minutes longer and had used that time to contain some more structure of a plot, I would have enjoyed it almost twice as much as I did, but I did enjoy it anyway. Would recommend for anyone who is a avid horror junkie looking for something sort of new in terms of the "bad guys", as well as an interesting take on the effects of the Chernobyl disaster.

If you have seen the trailer for Chernobyl Diaries, you will know that four young Americans go on an unofficial tourist excursion to Pribyat, the (supposedly) deserted town which was evacuated suddenly when the neighbouring Chernobyl reactor went up the Swannee. You will also know that Pribyat doesn't appear to be as deserted as it was made out to be, and things go horribly pear-shaped.

The film itself doesn't really give you much more than that, it just gives it to you over a longer period of time. Having seen the trailer, my money was always on radiation-raddled mutant cannibal survivors, but I won't tell you whether I was right or wrong.

This film was co-produced and co-written by Oren Peli and, like his Paranormal Activity films, it subscribes to the theory that less is more. Thus there is a lot of exploring, creeping around derelict unlit buildings, escaping from pursuers who are mainly noises, and the like.

This is a really dark film in terms of not very much light rather than tone, although it is not exactly cheerful. Anyone who has watched more than half a dozen horror films from The Evil Dead onwards will recognise this as a variation of the last-man-standing Cabin In The Woods genre, with a rather different setting.

The ending doesn't really provide the payoff the audience is entitled to.

I read a lot of reviews of horror films, and some people get upset because a film doesn't turn out to be what they wanted it to be, and I think that is going to happen here. On the other hand, I think it turned out to be exactly what it intended to be - a fairly low key, mounting dread, unnamed pursuit kind of movie with an unusual and effective setting.

I thought this movie was awful. The way it was shot it was very shaky and part way through I started to get motion sickness from all of the bouncing around. There was also almost no plot. The fact that the things chasing them were never further identified or even really seen just makes the lack of plot even more frustrating. There was SO much more they could have done with plot and really developed some interesting conspiracy theories or ANYTHING more than what they did. I would have much rather had a stronger more intricate plot and less of the shaky, obscure fights/ running scenes. There was some good built suspense and surprises but over all it left A LOT to be desired.

Chernobyl Diaries tells the story of a group of 6 twenty-somethings who sign up for a shady tour of Pripyat, a city outside Russia's infamous Chernobyl reactor, where all the workers lived with their families. The city is still abandoned... or is it? Despite the novel set- up, Diaries becomes very routine once our young adventure seekers become trapped in the city with whatever is lurking there and despite some reasonable competence behind the camera, the film never generates much suspense or tension as we know what's coming and even the jump scares were familiar enough to not have much effect. The photography is spooky and it helps give it a bit of atmosphere but, the two dimensional characters never give us a reason to care and the film follows a time worn blueprint for this kind of film and the odd and unsatisfying end doesn't help either. Chernobyl Diaries isn't the worst horror I have seen, but, it's lazy in that it takes it's unique setting and places within it a very unoriginal story and does nothing interesting with playing it out. It's as if the filmmakers felt that the creativity with the initial idea of setting a movie in that desolate area was enough to carry the whole film. It's not. They could have at least given us some shocking gore. They don't even do that as the kills are off screen and the carnage is barely shown. A rental at best if you are still curious.

The idea of basing a film in Prypiat is very cool and the setup of an extreme tour is also believable however these types of films are usually decent watching or truly awful, luckily Chernobyl Diaries is actually a decent Horror film.

The set-up is standard, stranded in some barren place being chased by something that wants to kill you, what helps this film to be better than your average horror fest is the location, you know there is no chance of any aid and you truly believe they are stuck there in a place where any kind of mutated animal can pop up.

Some of the directing is very effective in creating suspense particularly in the van scenes, it feels quite real and isn't over the top for the majority of the film. If you're a Horror film fan don't turn away from this as its quite enjoyable and I wasn't expecting much from it.