Chernobyl Diaries Review

I made a deal with PandaHatGirl because we both don’t like scary movies. We agreed to go see Chernobyl Diaries – because it looked so silly.

Well I went to go see it last week. And here are my thoughts. As usual, beware SPOILERS ahead.

First things first: I was impressed.

Normally when I do horror movies, within the first minute I can say: these people die, this person defeats/gets away and lives. With this movie, my expectations were completely wrong. Mostly.

The premise is this: four friends are tempted to go on an “extreme tourism” tour of Chernobyl, which has been closed ever since the nuclear accident. They are joined by a tour guide, and a honeymooning couple, which rounds out the number to a nice seven.

But once they get to Chernobyl, things start going wrong: their bus doesn’t start, leaving them stranded, and things come out in the night which aren’t very friendly.

SPOILER. Nobody lives. They are hunted down by the creatures of Chernobyl until the very end, with just two of them left. Then the military arrives. By then, the remaining two tourists have been exposed to high levels of radiation and can’t see. The military shoots down the guy, and drags away the girl.

We finally find out at the very end that the creatures were people once, who have been experimented on by the Ukranian government with radiation. They broke out and started eating people. Not very pretty. At the end, the scientists recover the creatures, and feed the girl to them. Ew.

It was a nasty end.

I also want to give this movie credit for its powerful suspense. Throughout the whole movie, my friends and I were holding our breaths, waiting to see what would come around the corner. Sometimes it was a stampeding bear. (SPOILER: there’s a stampeding bear). Other times, radiation-zombies would be stalking slowly closer.

Some scenes that were especially powerful include:

1. The kitchen scene. After the tour guide is carried off (he’s the first to go – naturally. That’s the one predictable death), three of the people follow his blood trail into an underground area with a kitchen. One of the radiation zombies is in there, feeding on the tour guide. In a moment of panic, the three are separated, and the girl is left alone in the kitchen with a cannibal. The scene was executed very well, it was very tense from start to finish. The suspense was almost palpable. Reminded me a bit of the famous kitchen scene from Jurassic Park. A+

2. In the bus. The tourists find a boarded up bus that was apparently someone’s shelter from the cannibal things for awhile. They go inside hoping to find guns or supplies. There was an especially tense moment there when they had to pull back a curtain. No cannibals, but part of the roof fell in, and it scared the shit out of us.

3. Watching the lovers bite the dust. Part of the story was that the main guy’s little brother was supposed to propose to his girlfriend while in Moscow. Instead, he got bitten, and they stayed in the broken down truck while the others went looking for help. When they come back, the truck is upside down and broken, and they find an i-phone recording of the attack. *shiver*

All in all, the suspense was very well delivered. I give kudos to a horror movie more for suspense than for gore effects, and this movie had just the perfect balance of both. Not too much gore, and continuous, nail-biting, excruciating suspense.

While it won’t win any awards for the storyline, it did well enough to get us involved and keep us involved, without getting bored.

Another great thing about it is that they keep the cannibal radiation things mostly in the dark. The scariest things are things we can’t see, and this movie played very well off of that, keeping the creatures hidden throughout most of the beginning, with only brief glimpses.

I went in expecting a dumb hour or two of non-scary monster mania, but I was wildly surprised and impressed by this movie. Don’t write it off as ridiculous just yet. It may be worth the watch.

That’s Chernobyl Diaries. JV out.