They’re young, they’re tourists and they want to go where nobody gets to go, to have an experience to brag about when they get home.
Visit Russia and Ukraine? You have GOT to sneak into long-off-limits radioactive dead zone around Chernobyl, the worst nuclear accident in history. When they hear rustling in one of the ruins they tour with their off-the-books guide Yuri, they are utterly freaked out when a real Russian bear bolts past them.
“Anyone else have a story like this?” Paul (Jonathan Sadowski) chortles. He’s the American living in the former USSR that five friends are visiting.
No, they don’t. And since “Chernobyl Diaries” is a horror picture, you immediately wonder who, in that sextet, will make it out to tell that story.
There are weird goings on in the ruins, the abandoned cars and overgrown forests that are the features of this desolate landscape.
“Are there people here?” one of the college coeds asks.
“Ees eeempossible,” Uri (Dimitri Diatchenko) declares.
Of course he’s wrong. Of course his rattletrap van, their “Mystery Machine” means of getting to the place, is sabotaged. Of course they’re stuck there, in the dark, where radioactive things go “bump” in the Chernobyl night. Of course they split up. Of course they start dying off.

Oren Peli, the guy behind “Paranormal Activity,” had a writing hand in “Chernobyl Diaries.” Thus, this standard-issue horror picture has a promising concept, at least. Pretty young tourists (Jesse McCartney, Olivia Dudley, Devin Kelly and Nathan Phillips among them) take an off-the-books trip to the forbidden zone around the worst nuclear accident in history and discover what has survived there.
The horror! The horror!

But the people Peli charged with turning this idea into a scary movie ignore many of the cardinal rules of horror — how to build suspense, the necessity of empathy in the characters, the need to give us and them hope and not just knock them off, quickly and brutally.
Perhaps effects specialist turned director Bradley Parker didn’t have the budget to make this genuinely spooky. A Geiger counter clicks a warning, humans dart through the frame in the distant background, and we ponder what they might be — zombies, cannibals, vengeful survivors.
Only one player in the cast reacts to the growing terror with something resembling human emotions — Ingrid Bolso Berdal. Only a couple of scenes create real suspense and urgency. No single moment raises the hair on he back of your neck.
And in the end, we all went to Ukraine —  and didn’t even bring back a stupid T-shirt.
Kudos, though, to the locations team and the set-dressers. Filmed in Serbia and Hungary, “Chernobyl Diaries” is the perfect on-screen realization of the site, vividly described in Alan Weisman’s recent best seller about life after humanity, “The World Without Us.” It’s just as he pictured it — desolate, decaying, with nature taking back what man has ruined.
Pity about the movie they managed to shoot in those locations.

MPAA Rating: R for violence, some bloody images and pervasive language
Cast:  Jesse McCartney,Jonathan Sadowski, Devin Kelly, Olivia Dudley, Nathan Phillips, Ingrid Bolso Berdal
Credits: Directed by Bradley Parker, written by Oren Peli, Shane Van Dyke and Carey Van Dyke. A Warner Brothers release.
Running time: 1:26