“Chernobyl Diaries” is a film that may have been suspenseful and scary if I actually cared about what was going on. It’s a zombie movie but it’s much more subtle than most zombie flicks. Parts of actually done well, it’s just that the early sequences fail to get us invested in the characters.

A group of tourists visiting destinations across Europe are in Ukraine when one of them meets a tour guide offering them a trip to the abandoned city near Chernobyl’s nuclear reactor. The rest of the group are initially hesitant but are ultimately convinced to go. However, they soon discover that they are not alone. It’s now a race against time as they try to survive with the radiation slowly but surely affecting them.

The characters in this movie are not quite as irritating as the characters in a lot of horror movies but they’re still pretty lame. Zombie movies often focus on a small group of characters and you need to be interested in them if you’re going to be interested in the events that unfold throughout the movie. We barely see the zombies so I cannot really comment on the design of them. This definitely is not like the George A. Romero films such as “Dawn of the Dead” where we see a lot of the zombies.

“Chernobyl Diaries” will probably disappoint fans of zombie films as we barely get to see the monsters and it will disappoint general audiences with its dull characters. It’s a shame that this film could have been saved with some better acting and better dialog. What’s on offer here is not awful by any means but it feels very amateurish and cheap at times. I think the filmmakers must have spent most of the budget holidaying round Europe for the opening montage.