Chernobyl Diaries

Chernobyl Diaries: The best thing I can say about this shoddy horror film is that it isn’t a found-footage movie. Oh, I’m sure the temptation to make it a found-footage film was there, what with American tourists daring to tread in the land of Chernobyl, and the fact this movie was co-written by Oren Peli, director of the first Paranormal Activity. What you basically get here is a found-footage film without the found-footage part, meaning the movie is cheap looking, gimmicky and utterly lacking in originality, but none of the characters are actually filming what’s going on at the time. (Actually, there is one sequence where they do that, so this movie is about 2 percent found footage.) A bunch of young adults pay some Russian guy to take them to an abandoned city next to Chernobyl, where they get frightened by monster fish, bears, crazy dogs and eventually some sort of radioactive mutant humans, although we never really get to see those. A bunch of stupid characters acting dumber than spit and getting offed one by one in extremely boring fashion.