Review of Chernobyl Diaries (2012) by Horcrux2007 — 15 Nov 2015

I wish I would have known that the screenplay was written by Shane Van Dyke, and if you don't know who that is, he directed a movie called Titanic II (yes, it's a real movie). Had I been aware of this unfortunate fact, I would have been spared of wasting 88 minutes on this laughably bad The Hills Have Eyes rip-off.

In Chernobyl Diaries, six tourists hire a tour guide to take them into the abandoned city of Pripyat, where workers for the Chernobyl nuclear reactor used to live. After a few lame jump scares, the crew begins to suspect that the town isn't completely abandoned.

Oren Peli came up with the story, and it's pretty obvious since there's not much action until the very end. This has never been much of a problem for me as long as the movie can conjure up a creepy atmosphere and some good suspense.

What this movie does instead is try to scare the audience with a ton of fake jump scares and age-old cliches. It doesn't make for an entertaining movie when the characters keep making the same stupid mistakes every other movie character has made before.

Watching a bunch of dimwits getting killed off in the dark is just predictable. However, the real atrocity here is the cinematography. For the first thirty minutes of the film, I was convinced this was a found footage flick because of how god damn shaky the camera was.

It looked like this was filmed by a blender. Other than a decently interesting setting, Chernobyl Diaries is an embarrassingly awful movie that uses all the worst horror tropes.