About five years ago, Oren Peli took a moderately clever idea and executed it moderately well, giving birth to the unlikely and lucrative Paranormal Activity franchise. Now, for his first feature screenplay credit since (no, he did not write Paranormal 2 or 3), Peli has a better concept, one with broader scope and even more potential for quality chills. And he hasn’t a clue what to do with it.
Peli’s best move would have been to keep all of Chernobyl Diaries to himself, getting his story to the page on his own, and getting his butt back behind the camera. Perhaps he’s burned out from trying to make a go of network TV—he co-wrote all eight episodes of ABC thriller The River, which the network canceled two weeks ago—because he passed off creative duties to some clearly inferior filmmakers. It’s appropriate that the young cast spends a good deal of time running in circles—it’s a metaphor for first-time director Brad Parker’s repetitive, colorless action.
We’ve got an established genre (tourism horror, if you will) and a solidly creepy setup, but Parker demotes Diaries to generic basics. The story follows a half-dozen travelers who meet a self-made “extreme tourism” guide in Kiev, a bulky hulk named Uri (Dimitri Diatchenko) who offers to take the gang to the ghost town of Prypiat, adjacent to the site of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. Once a city of some 50,000, it was abandoned almost immediately after the accident; 25 years later, it’s a giant empty museum piece.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
