Pun Salad

I won't bore you with the details of how we came to watch Chernobyl Diaries. Suffice to say: I would have preferred to get something else from Netflix, but I'm not the only person living in Pun Salad Manor.

Three young Americans (two female, one male) are doing a tour of Europe; they stop off in Kiev to meet with the male's brother, who lives there. They plan to travel on to Moscow, but the brother has a different idea: he's heard of a local guy, Uri, who engages in "extreme tourism", and one of the extreme tours is to Pripyat, the abandoned ghost town that the Soviets once built to house workers for the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. Together with another couple (Norwegian girl, Australian guy), they head off for Pripyat.

But this is a horror film, and other than its unique premise, it's extremely generic. Eventually, things get creepy, then scary, then the troupe starts getting picked off, one by one. The only question is whether there will be a sole survivor (probably the plucky independent girl) or whether they'll get her too.

Filmed mostly in shakycam, giving it that "found video" vibe, although most of the shots show the entire group, so who's holding the video camera? There's a lot of running, screaming, crying, mostly in the dark with flashlights waving around. It is rated R, but (I think) nearly entirely for overuse of the f-word; there's remarkably little gore, and the Disturbing Images aren't that Disturbing.