Inconsistent ‘Chernobyl Diaries’ Still Finds Effective Ways to Creep You Out

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Rating: 3.0/5.0

CHICAGO – Bradley Parker’s “Chernobyl Diaries” has just enough personality, confident technical elements, and outright weirdness to make it a trip worth taking for horror fans. The fact that the parts of the production that undeniably work couldn’t be wrangled into something that’s more competent overall is disappointing but there’s more to like here than one would expect. It’s a bit of a wasted opportunity but it will find a loyal audience who finds it original enough that they just don’t care.

With elements of “Hostel,” “The Hills Have Eyes,” and “Night of the Living Dead,” “Chernobyl Diaries” certainly gets points for wacked-out originality. It’s not every Friday that you see a horror movie that includes a bear attack, rabid wolves, a mutated fish, and something that looks like the creature from “Basket Case” crawling across a floor. “Chernobyl Diaries” is a WEIRD movie and that kind of personality is too often missing from mainstream horror films. The oddity of the horror here combined with some truly impressive camera work which I’ll get too later makes the clichéd elements of the production – characters who do nonsensical things, jump scares, etc. – and the absolutely horrendous ending easier to forgive.

Chernobyl Diaries
Photo credit: Warner Bros.

Chris (Jesse McCartney) and his beautiful girlfriend Natalie (Olivia Taylor Dudley) are going to visit his brother Paul (Jonathan Sadowski) in Kiev, Russia. They have brought along a gorgeous friend named Amanda (Devin Kelley) and the two pairs go out on the town for a night of vodka drinking. The next morning, instead of going to Moscow as planned, Paul brings the rest of his quartet a suggestion – there’s this guy named Uri (Dimitri Diatchenko) who runs “Extreme Tours” and he’s got a doozy of a tourist trap for them. Uri can take the quartet on an excursion to Pripyat, the city next to the Chernobyl nuclear reactor in which most of the workers at the plant lived with their families. Overnight, they were either killed or had to evacuate and the ghost town makes for a wonderfully creepy setting.

Uri takes the four Americans along with two other paying customers (Nathan Phillips & Ingrid Bolso Berdal) to the city, bypassing the guards at a checkpoint who tell them that it’s “closed for the day”. Here’s the moral of the story boys and girls – when an armed Russian guard tells you not to go to an abandoned city, LISTEN TO HIM. While things start off harmlessly enough with a mutated fish and some fabulous sightseeing if the sight you want to see is a ruined building, things get ugly when Uri’s car won’t start. And it didn’t run out of gas. It was sabotaged. They’re not alone.

From this point, “Chernobyl Diaries” becomes something of a numbers game. These people are completely screwed. They’re in the middle of nowhere. No one knows they’re there. Chances of survival are slim. And so one plays that game that we always do at horror films, trying to figure out who’s next. To that end, “Chernobyl Diaries” gets a bit disappointing (even if the order of the carnage is surprising). I wanted a few more twists and turns to the storytelling and it bogs down a bit around the hour mark when one realizes that it’s pretty much just a waiting game. And here’s where Parker and his four writers get bogged down as well. After amping up the tension for 80 minutes, the finale of “Chernobyl Diaries” is laughably bad. Without spoiling anything, the film kind of just wanders to a conclusion with little built-up tension.

Chernobyl Diaries
Photo credit: Warner Bros.

“Chernobyl Diaries” is one of those films that would be easy to rip apart and I’m sure many critics will do so by focusing on its clichéd elements (shaky cam, mediocre acting, etc.) and yet I kept finding things about it that I liked. For one, there’s a spectacular sense of space. Parker and his team used handheld cameras and often did so in unbroken shots, giving you a real sense of the unique location in which the film takes place. There’s a shot at a key moment when three characters leave the rest of the group in search of another and the camera stays with them unbroken from one end of a plaza to the other. We know the space they’re in and that sense truly enhances the horror (and is something that so many modern horror directors ignore). And Parker and his team craft some beautifully twisted sets like a pool that looks like it’s growing life to a bus riddled with bullet holes to a shrinking hallway going down, down, down…

I wish that “Chernobyl Diaries” had played around a bit more with subtext whether it be ugly Americans or the sense that walking over the graves of victims of a tragedy isn’t quite right. There’s a smarter version of this script that really could have been spectacular (with a different ending…this one reeks of an inevitable Blu-ray with “Five Alternate Endings!”) However, I’m not willing to dismiss the attempt at something truly bizarre in a genre that too often fails to take actual risks. By using its unique setting to the fullest, “Chernobyl Diaries” actually works.

By BRIAN TALLERICO Content Director HollywoodChicago.com brian@hollywoodchicago.com