CHERNOBYL DIARIES returns to many of the tropes that have made co-writer/co-producer Oren Peli famous for an exceptionally effective kind of low-budget, high-terror flicks. Unfortunately, this one isnt quite the creep fest that his PARANORMAL ACTIVITY suite was and is. While those films, particularly the first, retain a freshness that keeps the creepiness going at full tilt even after repeated viewings, this one is stale at first sight. The beats are too familiar, the jump-and-scares too predictable by half. Those elements, the subtle ones that made the earlier films work, are in evidence, but too few and far between to save the proceedings from devolving into a curiously muted example of the slasher genre. Not that theres much blood or gore, aside from a good look at a bone poking through some skin, though there is much in the way of suggestion of same. Again, one of the previously successful elements that finds no purchase here.
The premise finds a group of fresh-faced kids on whirlwind European tour when one of them proposes that in addition to the Tower of London and Eiffel Tower, they indulge in a bout of extreme tourism. That would be a trip to Pripyat, the town near the Chernobyl that was abandoned when the reactor disintegrated spreading radiation everywhere. Piling into a dubious van owned by their tour guide, Uri, a laconically garrulous ex-military type, the six of them embark on what they think will be a lark, but which the audience knows will go very, very wrong.
The kids are standard issue, the loving couple, the brothers with a prickly relationship, the newly single gal who becomes the object of one brothers affections while the other gal is about to have a ring offered to her by the other one. Added in are an Australian guy and his Norwegian sweetie all prepared to be moved by the spectacle of a city reduced to a ghost town by the follies of humankinds technological hubris.
The Peli idiom of hand-held camera work is used, but not, in this case, as the product of one of the characters telling the story in retrospect, though a few of those clips are tossed in, perhaps as an homage to Pelis previous efforts. Also consistent with that is the use of sound as a predominant element in the attempts to horrify. Sounds, in this case, that shouldnt be in a place thats been deserted for 25 years save for the wild animals roaming it at night. And soon enough, night falls on our tourists when Uris van is sabotaged and wolves become the least of their problems. There are rules that must be observed in a film with less than original thinking behind it, and the first of those is, of course, that the guide, the one who knows the lay of the land, goes out into that inky darkness to investigate an odd sound, leaving the six tourists alone and even more terrified than before.
There is also the rule about meting out hope and despair in equal measures to give at least some plausibility to the ongoing action. That part is well thought out, as is keeping what is menacing the kids out of sight for most of the film, and then revealed in only quick, shadowy glimpses. In a more tightly directed film, the idea of killer wolves, odd phantoms in an eerily abandoned city, and levels of background radiation that are building up to higher and higher internal levels in each of the hapless tourists with each passing hour would make for a nail-biter of respectable proportions. Here, though, there is the flatness of predictable formula unsparked by clever direction or particularly outstanding performances in stereotypical roles.
CHERNOBYL DIARIES has the virtue of actual footage of both the doomed city and the reactor, and a lovely moment at the beginning when one character, attempting to allay the others fears the night before embarking, asks what the worst that could happen might be. In the distance a cloud of fallen leaves suddenly whirls into a small eddy in the dark Kiev night. Serendipity or not, its got more art, mystery and menace than the rest of the flick put together.
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