Chernobyl Diaries

Ten years ago, the Ukrainian government let tourists visit the area around Chernobyl. 

They said it was safe... 

It wasn't.

Fans of horror movies beware. Chernobyl Diaries is scary. Scary bad, that is. In all honesty, the trailer for it looked better than the whole movie, and that is pretty darn sad.

It follows a group of 6 tourists who decided to go on an 'extreme tour' to the town of Pripyat, the former home of the workers of the Chernobyl Nuclear Plant that had the infamous fallout in the late '80s. Even though there is still radiation floating around, they will only be there for about 2 hours, and will be safe. At least, they think they will be.

Queue the clichéd plot elements (and the SPOILERS!)

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║    SPOILER ALERT!!    ║

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First, you have the shaky hand-held camera movement indicative of so many horror movies nowadays. Except in this case, the camera is not held by any of the characters, it's just shaky like one of them was holding it. Next, their van won't start. And then, their guide dies at a very inopportune moment. So now they are stranded. And the town isn't as abandoned as it seems.

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║    END OF SPOILERS    ║

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As the movie progresses, it presents you with various questions, much like any movie does. However, unlike any other movie, CD just keeps making you ask questions until the end of the movie, and doesn't answer any of the questions that they give you. They leave you completely hanging, especially considering that the movie just ended in a really awkward place. Now this leaves it wide open for a sequel, and I could even potentially see where they might go with it. But I pray to His Noodliness that they don't make one and subject us to the same crap again.

Do I even need to say what it got?

As you can tell, I was not impressed by this movie. At all. It gets the 3/10 stars just because it did succeed in two areas. First, it made you jump at a few points when you weren't quite expecting it. And second, it occupied the space of an hour and a half on a boring night. Even the addition of Jesse McCartney to the cast didn't make it much better. My recommendation would be to skip this movie entirely, but I know that there are people out there who will still want to see it. If you happen to be one of those people, don't buy it, rent or stream it if you can.

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