Chernobyl Diaries

Ever since the naive American backpackers in Eli Roth’s ‘Hostel’ stumbled into Slovakia, it’s been open season on tourists who go ‘off the map’. So why not a horror movie set during an illegal visit to Pripyat, the ghost city left behind when the Chernobyl nuclear reactor melted down and the entire population was evacuated? All you need is for a group of six young, disposable travellers and their ex-military ‘extreme tourism’ guide, Uri (Dimitri Diatchenko), to get stranded there after dark, and for feral dogs and mutant humans to emerge from the shadows. First-time director Bradley Parker makes decent use of the inherently eerie setting (locations in Belgrade and Budapest stand in for the real thing), but his disappointingly fright-free, cod-documentary approach is hampered by a sketchy script from writer-producer Oren Peli (‘Paranormal Activity’) and brothers Carey and Shane Van Dyke. So once the annoying, two-dimensional characters start getting bumped off one by one, it’s just a relief that the actors have stopped improvising their own banal dialogue.