If you’re an irradiated mutant under the somewhat substandard care of the Ukrainian government, fear not! For all of your leisure time will seemingly be spent watching an exorbitant amount of trashy horror movies until those clichéd tropes are so ingrained into your psyche that if you ever manage to escape the confines of the single cell prison you share with your inbred brood, you’ll waste no time in terrorising a bunch of rich American brats who are as stupid as they are thin and attractive, as opposed to getting the hell out of dodge with your hideously malformed family. Yay priorities!

CHERNOBYL DIARIES (2012)
Genre: Horror
Director: Bradley Parker
Rated: R
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A young American couple are travelling through Europe with a cumbersome third wheel also known as Amanda. In an effort to palm her off onto someone else so that he can propose to his girlfriend Natalie, Chris suggests that they swing by Kiev for a pit stop to meet his abrasive sibling Paul who immediately illustrates just how stupid he is by asking everyone if they’ve ever heard of Chernobyl.

With that little snafu out of the way, Paul drops his next bombshell; extreme tourism bitches! Get ready for some adrenalin pumping action, because this crazy train is about to derail with the prospect of *drumroll* driving to an abandoned town and poking about in a few empty rooms for a couple of hours. And get ready to shit your pants because the tour guide has his own god damn Geiger counter to make sure things get really fucking intense! I’m sure once Paul finds out what a dictionary is, learns how to read and is directed to look up the definition of extreme, he may ultimately decide to revise his pitch.

But it’s all coming up Paul as the group decide to tag along and head off to meet their hard as nails tour guide Yuri and encounter two additional tourists who are actually likeable characters and will therefore be amongst the first to die.

Yuri is an old pro when it comes to ferrying civilians into the abandoned town and so he’s more than a tad flummoxed at finding his route barred by an armed military presence. Rather than rescheduling in the face of this very unusual set of events that should probably be given some weighty consideration, he opts to bypass the main road and sneak in his tour group anyway. Fuck the police! No one’s going to piss all over the chance to pull out his old “Ahhhh! It’s got my hand!” party trick.

With the highlight of the tour out of the way, Yuri calls an end to the fun and games when he spots the remnants of a hastily constructed fire in one of the abandoned buildings. When the party reach the van, he discovers that someone, or something, has chewed through the wires. Which wires? THE wires.

And so opens the floodgates of horror movie tropes that are being carried out by the aforementioned mutants who casually flip flop between sabotage, subterfuge, all-out assault and kidnapping, and sending their young to do their best coy Boo impression in the midst of a gaggle of spooked strangers whilst they pick them off one at a time.

Will the doomed day-trippers pull their thumbs out of their arses and find a way to escape? Has one of them brought along a camera to shoehorn in some Paranormal Activity style first person documentation of events? You can bet your ass they did. Will you find yourself inexorably cheering on the mutants to get this carnage over with? Definitely. Root for your favourite fiend in Chernobyl Diaries.

We dare you to buy Chernobyl Diaries on DVD!

Author Gamer Girl is a podcast co-host on FrontTowardsGamer Radio. You can check out her blog at GamerGirlTalk.com. It is highly recommended you follow her on Twitter.
Previously in Poison Popcorn: Top 10 Badass Taxi Drivers on Film. See previous Poison Popcorns right fucking here!