Starring: Jonathan Sadowski, Devin Kelley, Jesse McCartney, Olivia Taylor Dudley, Nathan Philips, Ingrid Bolso Berdal & Dimitri Diachenko
Rating: ★★
This is quite possibly the weirdest thing I may ever write about a horror movie, but here goes. Everyone complains about how unrealistic the characters are in these types of movies, and how they do incredibly stupid, unbelievably dumb things that result in their deaths. This is of course a staple trope of the horror genre, and without it, as I realised when watching Chernobyl Diaries, scary movies are dull. Can I really say that the main problem with this film was that the characters in it acted too realistically, which meant that it became incredibly monotonous? No, but trust me when I say that it didn’t help make the film anymore interesting.
The main idea of Chernobyl Diaries is that a group of backpackers decide to visit Russian to partake in ‘extreme tourism’ and visit a town left completely derelict after the Chernobyl disaster. Of course, we all know that the town won’t be empty and that things for them are not going to end well. Even though it has a very strong premise and the glimmer of a terrifying journey, Chernobyl Diaries, rapidly begins to become bland and boring, mainly because the group decide to ‘stick together’ rather then be picked off one by one (even though they ultimately are), and, rather tediously, the people are killed off screen, which, to me, sucks the fun out of the horror movie.
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| Don't look behind you... mutants lurk around every corner. |
You don’t always have to have gore to make a horror movie great: some of the best in the genre are not particularly gruesome, but they have real, nerve shredding tension. Vacancy is a great example of this. Some have tension and gore and these elements work together to create a frightening and truly eerie experience (for example Quarantine or Rec 2). Sadly, Chernobyl Diaries doesn’t have tension or gore, and after the first twenty minutes, which are surprising interesting as we ‘tour’ the decimated town and learn about the Chernobyl disaster, nothing really happens. There are a few very well executed jumps and scares, especially when they go into some of the buildings and are being chased by the mutants (or monsters), but overall, the action and thrills are pretty weak.
Another issue I had with it was the fact that we never got to see the mutants/monsters or whatever it was terrorising the group. And there was no real explanation for them. Sure, sometimes this works effectively: withholding an explanation only makes it scarier (just like Quarantine!). But in this instance, it doesn’t work. And when the entire film is built up around a group of evil beings victimising the main characters, we expect to see them in all their glory, but in Chernobyl Diaries, we don’t, and it is very frustrating and annoying. There are also some glaringly obvious problems with the monsters too: they are apparently strong enough to flip an entire van, but they can’t break a door down, and some of the characters are able to fight them off. Does this make any logical sense? There are also several other terrible and jarringly obvious continuity problems, but I won't list them, or this article will see more like a rant than a review.
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| The group try their best to survive the attacks. |
Chernobyl Diaries tries its hardest to emulate horror movies that are so much better than it, and in doing so it becomes a standard, paint by numbers and tiresome affair that never makes the most of its original and unusual premise. It could have been so much better than it was, so it is a shame. There’s only so many horror movies I can watch in which people run around in the dark screaming their heads off, and in this instance, because nothing really happens in between these moments, it just becomes tedious.
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