Chernobyl Diaries

The best thing I can say about this shoddy horror film is that it isn’t a found-footage movie. I’m sure the temptation to make it a found-footage film was there, considering the plot—American tourists dare to tread in the land of Chernobyl (with cameras aplenty)—and considering the fact that this movie was co-written by Oren Peli, the 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. 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 some sort of radioactive mutant humans, although we never really get to see those. A bunch of stupid characters act dumber than spit and get killed one by one in an extremely boring fashion.