Chernobyl Diaries Review

• 17th Oct 2012

Chernobyl Diaries diverts from the standard horror tale only in that it takes its premise from a real life incident rather than a feeling of place as in say The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or Hostel. In this way the film becomes slightly political and plays on our fears of such a thing recurring again. The story is quick to get going and gives us a montage opening showing a group of four American friends on a European vacation going to such mainstays as London, Paris and Frankfurt. They soon find themselves in Kiev, Ukraine, not a common stop on the tourist trail. There one of the group persuades the rest of the group to go on an ‘extreme’ tourist trip to the town of Pripyat, a small Soviet town that was the home of the workers of the Chernobyl nuclear plant. In 1986 disaster befell the Soviet Union when one of its nuclear reactors went into meltdown. Ever since then the town and the area for a radius of 30km has been a no-go radioactive zone that is simply known as the Zone. While there the groups van of course stops working and soon there tour guide is mysteriously killed. It becomes a matter of survival for the group as they must contend with an area with high doses of radiation. But that is not all. It would appear that they are not alone and that there appears to be cannibalistic mutations.

I think it would be fair to say that the film blends the Eastern European terrors of films like Hostel (2005) and the unseen horrors lurking in the darkness as in The Descent. (200?). Essentially the film is one long sequence of chases and jumps and does a reasonable job of it. The film is far from original, doing an effective job as it does with making its audience jump and maybe even shriek but in the process there is a lot of running around. Mostly filmed in Serbia, the locale is fitting and looks appropriate weathered and abandoned with its old former communist structures. As in The Descent these are not zombies but rather flesh eating mutations that have adapted to their environment. Also like its predecessor it goes for the idea that less is more (unlike zombie movies where it assumes that the more gore the better). The creepiest moments are not the figures lurking in the darkness which we only see in silhouette or for a fragment of a second but the suggestion of mutation fish in the local rivers and ponds. Curiously the dogs and bears running around don’t appear to be mutations, merely aggressive and hungry.

There are a host of extras on the disc including an alternate ending, a deleted scene and some interactive fun such as a viral video and something called ‘Uri’s Extreme Tours Infomercial’. The extras go for more fun assuming that its target the films target audience is an audience that is perhaps into thrash metal or such the like. The viral video does provide some background context into the meltdown itself including about the town of Pripyat and plays on the conspiracy theories questioning the exclusion and experiments that have been rumoured to have taken place there. And of course this is the basis the film is running with. In conclusion I think, like Hostel this film is telling Americans that it is not safe to travel and that it is better being in a safe place than being amongst that dangerous place that is Eastern Europe and in other words its safer to stick to the path.

Chris Hick