Low-budget fright flicks have become a part of our culture since 1999’s Blair Witch Project. A good number of these the majority of the public has never heard of because the completed product goes straight to video. Another batch makes it to the big screen, some of which we convince ourselves to see (The Fog, Darkness, Feardotcom), and after 20 minutes, we wish it had gone straight to video and never heard of it. Then there is the small group of these movies you cannot just tolerate but come to enjoy for whatever reason. The best example is 2005’s The Descent, which saw a group of six 20-something females trapped in a cavern on a girls’ getaway weekend and hunted by a force that lives in the dark. This movie was an instant classic and still a top-five horror movie. Chernobyl Diaries is nowhere close to The Descent, but it still offers many of the same elements that made this movie successful. It offered a small group of no-name actors. It was set in a location where you could suspend your beliefs and start to believe that anything is possible. There are the slowly developing scenes where you know something bad is about to happen, and you are just sitting there wondering what that will be and when it will occur. Finally, it has a handful of jump-out-your-seat moments. For these reasons, I give Chernobyl Diaries a positive review and would encourage low-budget horror fans to check it out.

Certainly not a top 10 movie of 2012, but easily the year’s top horror flick, Chernobyl Diaries tells the story of a group of six young tourists who hire a self-described extreme tour guide to take them to Pripyat, Ukraine, which was a little town to house workers of the Chornobyl Nuclear reactor. The part of this story that is true is that the largest nuclear power plant disaster ever occurred at the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant on April 26, 1986. The explosion released a large number of radioactive particles into the atmosphere. Much of western Russian and Europe was affected. The effects of the accident, which included deaths, cancer, and deformities, are still being felt today. Pripyat is an abandoned town and is generally off-limits to the public.

The part of the story that is fiction is the rogue tour guide who escorts the six tourists to the city. He has a radiation reader and promises the group that they will be okay because they won’t be at the disaster site long enough to be exposed. Well, without giving away anything that isn’t shown in the previews, we know that something goes terribly when the seven are touring the city. And you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that the seven will probably get stranded in this ruined city. That’s the universal of any horror film. In any case, I was a fan. The demolished city looked believable. Knowing that anything and everything had been exposed to massive amounts of radiation opened my mind to thinking that whatever I was watching could be possible.

On the positive side, I never felt bored or like the movie was taking some weird tangent. It was a perfect length for me. I was spooked four or five times. There were a couple of really cool scenes. I liked the way it ended. There were a lot of positives for me. On the negative side, the acting was atrocious. I’m not even going to mention any of the actors or characters by name because there wasn’t a single performance that was better than slightly below average. In terms of the story, I felt no attachment to any of the actors. I didn’t expect to in a movie like that, but I really could have cared less about what happened to any of them. Still, I was able to get over the poor acting and enjoy the movie for what it was…a true popcorn flick.

Plot 8/10
Character Development 4/10
Character Chemistry 4/10
Acting 3/10
Screenplay 8/10
Directing  8/10
Cinematography 10/10
Sound 9/10
Hook and Reel 8/10
Universal Relevance 6/10
68%

The grade doesn’t fairly represent how I felt about the movie. I’d actually give the movie a B. The acting is some of the worst you’ll ever see, but it was one of those few times I could see past it.

Movies You Might Like If You Liked This Movie

• The Ruins
• Paranormal Activity
• The Descent
• Sinister
• The Blair Witch Project