So one of my most recent favorite past-times is to watch terrible horror movies that have been released in the last decade or so and try to pick it apart logically.
One of said movies I watched recently went by the name of "Chernobyl Diaries".
Oh my God, this was frieken terrible, and probably deserves (if not more than deserves) the 19% on Rotten Tomatoes.
It's truly sad too, because, as you can imagine from the title, it's based on urban legends/horror stories surrounding the Chernobyl disaster about how the city of Pripyat and such isn't really abandoned. I'll get to that in a bit, but to let you know, I don't know about now due to the situation with Russia invading Crimea and Ukraine and such, but last I heard, I saw a Wikipedia article (I know, great source of information /sarcasm) that said about 2,000 people, mostly scientists, are living close to the plant to study the effects of what the radiation is doing to the surrounding areas.
Anyways, on with the rant.
I will admit, I did skip the first 20-30 minutes of the movie because when you're watching a horror movie, especially one like this, who really cares about backstory? I mean seriously?
What the movie was about was some kids from America all visiting their friend/family member who's living in Moscow or some shit and think its a great idea to tour East Europe, Chernobyl and the abandoned city of Pripyat being one of those places. They hire a tour guide to bring them there, and when they get to a checkpoint right outside the area, there's armed guards there saying the area is off-limits due to "maintenance". As you can imagine, the kids and tour guide don't heed the blatantly obvious warning from the guards that something is seriously fucked up in the area and decide to sneak in anyways.
I don't know about you guys, but if armed guards at one of the checkpoints is telling me the area is off-limits, my first guess isn't that some horrible monsters are afoot, but rather another accident of sorts happened and more radiation leaked into the area. Would it sucked that I paid for this tour and now I can't see it? Okay, sure, but I'm not going to risk myself being irradiated to see a few abandoned buildings I could have seen online anyways.
Anyways, they park near a few of the abandoned apartment buildings in Pripyat and begin exploring, when the tour guide notices that an abnormal amount of animal corpses are around. Stupid kids end up goofing around the apartment buildings, and when its time to leave, they hear a noise coming from a nearby apartment (queue shitty jump scare). Turns out its a brown bear, and once again the tour guide is noticing that this is unusual behavior for such animals.
They go back to the van that they had come in, and, surprise surprise! The van doesn't work thanks to something having destroyed the motor or some shit.
It's getting dark, and again, surprise surprise, no one knows their out there. While their bickering and fighting about who's fault it is that this happened, one of the girls notices that something odd is happening outside as she hears the sound of a baby crying. This is where it starts to get really stupid.
The tour guide said blatantly that the nearest checkpoint was about 12-13 miles away, and that they should sleep in the van for the night, having a person on guard every couple of hours and walk there in the morning. What do they do once they hear the 'baby crying'? Of course, the tour guide pulls out a pistol from his glove department and decides to check what the sound is about, one of the dumb americans following him because he's upset that he has to stay in a van for a night.
Again, this is where my logic kicks in, and I would told the motherfuckers to stay put, turn off the van light, and somebody or somebodies stay on guard to keep an eye open for whatever is outside (wild dogs ended up attacking their van before and that's why their so jittery and stupid). If the guard see's something suspicious, rather than freaking out and making the rest of us more uncomfortable, they quietly notify the other members of the van of what's up and quietly decide what to do.
Anyways, tour guide gets ambushed, fires off a few shots and another one of the americans, the big brother of the dumb american who left or something goes rushing out to find his brother. Again, queue shitty jump scare as the americans come back, pounding the window to be let in, and the younger brother has bite marks on his leg. Where's the tour guide? Who the fuck knows.
Morning comes and four of the six americans decide to go outside to try to find the tour guide/his gun. They do finally end up finding the tour guide, or at least his corpse, which has been ripped to shreds. This is the first we 'see' the monsters plaguing the area, and the monsters basically look like Voldemort from the Harry Potter series. Grey skin, no hair, and radiation somehow makes them want to eat human flesh.
They manage to escape the monster and kill it before running away trying to find the nearest checkpoint. Oh yeah, did I mention they were in Chernobyl? As in, a highly radioactive place in some places?
Yeah, apparently even though their Geiger Counter is going off the charts, telling them they're walking in one of these highly radioactive places, they end up becoming just fine, and isn't until the very end where two of the characters are still alive does radiation finally begin to affect them in the dumbest way possible.
Anyways, they manage to stumble across this parking lot where all these cars are parked from the initial disaster. Two of them stumble across a bus that's riddled with bullet holes, to which they initially think that the guards during the incident may have been commanded to shoot everyone inside, until one of the americans that the bullet holes in the metal are actually exit holes and that the shooting had been done from the inside-out.
The two americans exploring the bus find out that something really weird went down, even stumbling across some tethered cloth from a window that's from a Ukrainian guard uniform, while the other two americans managed to find a van exactly the one they had been in and find the part they need to replace. Queue 'scary' dog chase scene. They get away and begin to make their way back to the van, looking at a map they had found while looking for the tour guide. Of course, the 'scary' scene is that while their arguing and bickering about where their going, one of the monsters does a "Signs" as I like to call it and walks across the road their on behind them, going into the woods and attacking some the wild dogs. This freaks them out and they quickly run back to the van.
When they finally reach the area that the van was in, they find that the van is no longer there and begin to think that they were left behind. That is, until one of people finds a part of the van on the road and trail of debris, to which they all follow and find the van flipped over right around the corner, completely destroyed and the other two americans completely gone. Among the debris, one of the girls find a camcorder or something where the girl inside the van had and just happened to be recording shortly before they were attacked, recording the entire event.
The four americans go on to try to find their friends then. They managed to find one after again coming across one of the monsters, but think they got away. They again begin to bicker and moan about how they fucked up and where they should go when 'spooky scene' happens and one of them notices that a couple feet away from them is a little kid just standing there. While they're trying to communicate with the kid and trying to figure out what the fuck she's doing there, the girl they had found once again got abducted by the monsters and they all chase after her, the little girl having vanished when they look the other way.
The next I would say 15-20 minutes is just them running away from the monsters, getting picked off one by one until there's only two left. And here's where it gets really stupid. You remember how I said the two characters finally would have the radiation affect them? Yeah, that's because they run into Reactor 4, the place where the initial explosion happened, the place that, other than the Red Forest, is highly contaminated and you won't be able to survive more than 5 minutes in it without a radiation suit.
They manage to be in the reactor for more than 15 minutes I would say, no radiation suit, and the worst that happens to them is their skin burning and the remaining one guy becoming blind. They managed to go outside from Reactor 4 anyways, and when they do, somehow the Ukrainian government knew exactly where they were, despite no one knowing where they had been previously. The guard kills the guy as they basically say to stay still, and the guy doesn't listen and gets shot in the chest. The remaining girl is put into custody and gets put on a stroller, supposedly to be treated for becoming irradiated. Instead, the movie ends with the Ukrainian doctors sticking her into a room, where apparently a whole bunch of these monsters are being held, and she ends up dying that way.
All in all, it was incredibly dumb movie. But the monsters... I don't know what the movie makers were thinking, but I'm sorry to tell ya, radiation doesn't exactly work that way people. Maybe, MAYBE one or two people out of millions would be able to survive and adapt to high levels of radiation, but they would be extremely lucky, and more than likely not without consequence. An entire society where they're able to procreate, is not possible after such an event. And why the fuck do they eat human flesh? Did the radiation affect their morality as well? I mean, my God, the one creepy-pasta story I had read once that was similar to this was better. It at least had the creativity to make it so that the humans in the area were affected by the radiation more than 'their skin became grey and they lost all hair', like growing extra limbs and shit or growing wings in one instance.
I found more creativity from "Frankenstein's Army", fucking "Frankenstein's Army" for God's sake! At least then the monsters were cool, despite being Nazi Zombies...