Best movie of this year hands down!

To me, this movie is perfection.

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

Look, if you're going to use a setting as iconic and well documented as Pripyat or Chernobyl, you need to get your facts straight. I understand that this was a low budget horror flick, but if you can't even get the iconic ferris wheel right, maybe you should rethink what you're doing. Also, a basic understanding of the effects of radiation on the human body leaves the ending laughably impossible. Pile on that the myriad photos of reactor 4 entombed in its sarcophagus and I spent the last 20 minutes just waiting for it all to be over. There's just no way those folks would have gotten into that reactor. If you want an atmospheric horror flick that uses the premise of murderous mutants stalking around an irradiated, abandoned town done well, do yourself a favor and watch John Carpenter's The Hills Have Eyes.

When a group of friends tour Europe, Paul coaxes the others to take a detour. That detour is to the abandoned city of Pripyat, near Chernobyl. When the group gets together they meet up with Uri, an extreme tour guide. Uri is an ex-Russian, military officer. When they get to Uri's tours, they also meet up with two Norwegians, who are along for the tour. Uri assures them that the tour will be safe. He tells them that the radiation levels have just gone down, and since they will be their for a short time there's nothing to worry about. Once they get to Pripyat they encounter a checkpoint. Uri gets out and talks to the guards, the guards explain that there is no tours, due to inspection. The group is upset, they paid and want to see Pripyat/Chernobyl. Uri tells them there is nothing to be worried about he know another way in. Once in they discover the abandon city of Pripyat. It is in ruins from the Chernobyl disaster of 1986. The building have been reclaimed by nature, and all you see is the destruction. The housing complexes are eerie, and one of the girls takes snapshots of the different buildings. While looking around, before they go in they discover a carcass of a dead dog in the entry way of the apartments. While looking around, Uri finds a hot spot, but covers it quickly. The group in also surprised by a big bear that races past them.When they return from Pripyat to leave. The van doesn't start, it seems something or someone has striped the ignition cables. Then all of a sudden voices are heard. The group looks at each other and Uri gets a gun and goes to investigate. Chris goes and chases after him, then gun shots are heard. Two minutes later Chris returns, but a pack of wild dogs are right on his heels. He gets in the van with the help of the others, but his leg is mauled. Later on everyone except Chris/his fiancée go to investigate and find Uri. They return to Pripyat where Uri is in pieces, and they are in some underground bunker in Pripyat.When they return to tell Chris, the van is destroyed, and they are gone. The group travels back, and they realize they are not alone. One of the girls discovers a humanoid figure in her photo. When they get back to where they were, they are being followed. The group discovers a makeshift lab, and a building full of mutants. They try to escape but they are drawn deeper, where they don't realized they are inside the reactor. When they finally try to get help, they are hoodwinked, by those running these experiments. The only survivor thinking she's in a hospital, is fooled.I liked this movie, a lot of excitement, mystery, and surprise. The ending could have been better, but it had that fright effect.

So, I just wanted some exciting horror for the night. My expectations were definitely not high, since horror movies often are just stupid. They are good though if they succeed in entertaining me at some level.This movie here, as you might see from the low score I gave it, wasn't very entertaining. Chernobyl Diaries started off with some basic young adult's vacation stuff, having fun and all, yeah. In comes Uri who takes a group of friends and other travelers to Pripjat to take a look at the ghost town. Unsurprisingly their car won't start when they are about to leave the place after the tour. From there on, everything goes wrong and the group starts to gain casualties as the hostile residents of the so called ghost town attack them...They got angry dogs and random radioactively contaminated angry people who seem to be unable to communicate in any human level but are just about enough smart to get the group members one at a time. For some reason they just kill them, I guess they want to eat them or something. I don't understand why they even would keep lurking in the shadows since they have an overwhelming superiority of people. It's just so stupid. Why would there even be people left in Pripjat? On rare occasion movies just get worse all the time. Chernobyl Diaries is a great example of that kind of movie. It feels like every scene just sinks the movie deeper into stupidity, irrationality and clichés. It's not even entertaining: no humor can be found and I couldn't even laugh at any funny looking monsters since they barely even showed them. These mutant people were just a gray mass of meat with faces like the Slipknot singer Corey Taylor's current mask. As a summary, let's say that in this movie you can find a bunch of clichés, boring characters (close to the end I just hoped they all would die soon), boring monsters, cheap special effects and one amusing jump scare (the bear). The setting was a good chance gone to waste. This movie could easily have been much better if someone had told the writers about a little thing called imagination. In this movie there is pretty much nothing original or interesting whatsoever.2/10

Chernobyl, Pripyat, the whole area in real life is tailor made for delivering really good horror/suspense, like STALKER game did and Stalker movie years before the game.Instead of coming up with something new and actually scary, Chernobyl Diaries (CD) instead tries to mix Descent with The Hills Have Eyes (except with comically bad monster masks from Halloween store) and fails to give you horror and thrills of either of the movies it is trying to rip-off.While the movie started out fine, with tourists stuck in the hell-hole of Pripyat, the moment it actually starts delivering the "scares", you can kiss all atmosphere goodbye.The director first throws a bear at you for a cheap jump scare, then dogs, yes DOGS, simple dogs which are just hungry.. then they bring out the cliché-fest of cannibals. And they fail at using any of them to actually scare the audience. In-fact, the cannibals apparently spend their time standing in darkness camping and waiting for camera to face them so they can pull a tourist back trying to jump "scare" the audience. They do that till the last shot (last shot is a jump "scare" as well). This is a movie made by someone who thinks jump "scares" are actually scary and not startling.Lemme put it this way. I was expecting Blair Witch like psychological horror set in Chernobyl, but I got hilariously bad "horror" similar to the overrated comedy-horror movies like Insidious and Paranormal Activity (I think PA is actually scarier than this movie haha). This was just bad.This movie is so disappointing that while writing this review, I lowered my score from 3/10 to 1/10.So watch it if you like being disappointed. This movie delivers on that front.