Movie Review - Chernobyl Diaries (2012)

The 1980s were a busy decade for major disaster events across the globe, and 1986 was no exception.  The two big stories were the Challenger Explosion above Cape Canaveral, FL, USA (an event I witnessed on television in school) and the Chernobyl nuclear disaster near Pripyat, Ukraine, USSR.  The Challenger explosion was more important to me at the time because I wanted to be an astronaut and it happened in America; what I learned about Russia came from movies like Rocky IV, Red Scorpion, and Red Heat.  While still important, I have seen what took place in Chernobyl and Pripyat and my heart goes out to the victims and their descendants.  More often, I hear of entertainment inspired by the disaster, and its aftermath--things like extreme tourism and urban exploration of abandoned Pripyat, the FPS video game S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl and the horror movie Chernobyl Diaries.  These things never seem to display an understanding that a disaster happened there over 25 years ago and that one should be respectful of the victims.  Sadly, this very fact did not sell movie tickets or game units as much as "wander into a guarded radioactive exclusion zone and get scared/killed by radioactive mutant inhabitants".  If it didn't then I wouldn't have a movie to write about.

PRIPYAT EXPLORATION PARTY (from left to right):
Zoe the Norwegian, Michael the Australian,
Paul, Yuri the suspicious Russian tour guide,
Amanda, Natalie and Chris.

Chernobyl Diaries could have gone a completely different way, but for a vote and peer pressure.  Hence several stupid Americans--Chris (Jesse McCartney) and his very blonde girlfriend Natalie (Olivia Taylor Dudley), Chris' brother Paul (Jonathan Sadowski) and Natalie's friend Amanda (Devin Kelley)--a Norwegian (Ingrid Bolsø Berdal) and her Australian fiancee (Nathan Phillips) meet up in Kiev to go on an extreme tourism run to Pripyat to tour the abandoned radioactive city with their highly suspicious Russian tour guide (Dimitri Diatchenko).  The usual happens when they reach spoooOOOOky Pripyat: the vehicle is crippled somehow, cellphones don't work, nobody answers the Walkie-Talkie, and everyone jumps at shadows.  There was a point where I waited a full minute waiting for a jump scare after I called it.  Throw in mysterious humanoid things that attack from the dark that seem to have a taste for raw flesh and you have a recipe for disaster.  Especially when you realize that had Chris just stuck to his guns, he'd be still be alive to tell everyone abut his not-so-awesome European trip.

Chris was present when the vote was cast and he didn't have to go. But everyone else was going, and he had just been outvoted...by Natalie, the woman he wanted to marry.  This should have been the linchpin to let him know he shouldn't marry this girl if she wasn't going to use her head on a trip to a foreign country where blonde White women  go missing and nobody cares but the men who buy them.  Instead, he's like "Oh OK honey, we can go into the poisonous radioactive zone; I can propose marriage to you later" and never gets the chance.

"Like zoiks, Scoob, I wonder when the rest of the
gang'll be back"  "REAH! Re-hee-hee-hee..."

There were several things that made me wonder about this movie, especially the throwaway line about Chris accepting a one-way plane ticket to Kiev from his brother.  WHO THE FUCK DOES THAT? WHO ACCEPTS A ONE-WAY PLANE TICKET ANYWHERE FROM ANYONE, WITH NO WAY TO GET BACK ALREADY SET UP? 

When Amanda takes pics and sees images of faces spying from shadowy windows and doesn't tell anyone, despite constant speculation and queries about whether people still live in the abandoned city? That's like setting up your entire crew to get killed.  Also, those guards don't stand there for nothing all day: they were obviously are there to hold a line to keep people out or things in.  These tourists were more concerned about the money they spent to go on a trip to a dangerous and forbidden area than staying under the notice of the law.  Blonde-ass Natalie even made the comment, "We might end up in a Ukranian jail or something".  Bitch, you're lucky your dumb ass didn't get kidnapped by the drunk guys at the beginning of the movie and sold into sex slavery.  That would have been a lot more interesting to watch if her friends broke through hell to rescue her  instead of finding her barely molested corpse behind some machinery in Chernobyl.

OK so they know they're not supposed to be in Pripyat,
they know that Chernobyl is hella contaminated, and yet
they all go chasing an ill-prepared tour guide who
brought them to this living graveyard in the first place
through its hallways. Morons.

Which now brings me to a BIG issue I had with this movie: instead of facing down wild dogs (whom they could have intimidated with their tool-using opposing thumbs), they chose to go further into the radioactive zone, even into the site of the disaster itself--the ruined Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant.  Here, nature reclaimed only so much, and a miscarriage of technology changed those left behind.  When the surviving members head deeper into the site, they had a Geiger counter with them, ticking off all the way and getting more intense as they approached certain areas.  At times their skin would blister, they would feel sick, and one guy even went blind.  It was made clear to them at the start that they would have to leave after a period of time to avoid radiation poisoning just being in Pripyat...and yet they went deeper in to...I don't know, get more poisoning. There was no one to save, no reason to go deeper.  It's like watching a murder victim in a slasher flick run upstairs to escape the killer.

IT'S A TRAP!

While the movie was bad, the ending was both good and fitting: no one survived, everyone got what they deserved, and no one bred their genes to make more stupid people. There are two down sides to this movie.  For starters, this may be the only information people may learn about Chernobyl or the issues with nuclear energy.  Second, this film was more money in the hands of Oren Peli, the man responsible for the Paranormal Activity series--now on its fifth movie. 
PLEASE STOP HIM BEFORE HE KILLS BRAIN CELLS AGAIN--DO NOT SEE THIS MOVIE, NOT EVEN ON BOOTLEG.

RATING: 2/10

Movie Review - Jason X (2001)

We'll start this movie review off as I usually do: through a anecdotal segue.
Ever since I started watching Hercules in the Paramount Pictures' Action Pack, I began to take more and more interest in the work of Sam Raimi after Army of Darkness. The director has a great body of work after the Evil Dead trilogy (looking at you, Cleopatra 2525) and hit the big time with Spider-Man. While Spider-Man is great, my mind still remembers a time when the gods were cruel and plagued mankind with suffering and lands in turmoil cried out for heroes. Most lands preferred Lucy Lawless' Xena, but I preferred Kevin Sorbo.

I don't know if it's just that he's a pretty man or if chicks in the Hellenic Period were easy, but Mr. Sorbo has brought more babes to bed as Hercules than Captain Kirk in Star Trek. When Mr. Sorbo left the Greek world, he ended up in a world created by Star Trek's creator Gene Roddenberry called Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda. There, he's Dylan Hunt, captain of the Commonwealth Fleet's warship called the Andromeda Ascendant. He's the only Commonwealth officer to exist after 300 years and he wants to rebuild the lost government with the help of his Rag-Tag Crew™. Two members of his new crew are the human pilot Beka Valentine (played by Lisa Ryder) and the ship's android avatar that goes by the name "Rommie" (played by raging Anglo-Filipina hotness Lexa Doig). Now, I bring up these two characters from Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda to illustrate a weird coincidence that happened in the casting of the tenth installment of the Friday the 13th horror series called Jason X.

Our story shows up at the capture of our main antagonist Jason (played by stunt master Kane Hodder). I'll never know why people think they can just catch Jason, tie him up and be done with it. You can't. The people who have him in custody are government types who are going to dispose of Jason (good idea) by driving him cross-country to a dumpsite (bad idea) and getting rid of him there. The doctor on staff for the transport of Jason is Dr. Rowen (Lexa Doig), a woman highly opposed to giving Jason any chance to escape. Don't worry, say the higher-ups on site; he's in chains with guards watching him, he's not going anywhere.
Sure enough, the guard (note the singular form) is killed and Jason goes on a rampage, killing many soldiers and chasing Dr. Rowen about. She tricks Jason into a cryogenic chamber to freeze him for 500 years, but he stabs Rowen through the cryotube and they both are frozen for 500 years. Over the years, mankind destroyed Earth and fled to space. A team of medical students is on a field trip to the dead planet Earth to see what they can find in its ruins. They stumble upon the facility that holds Jason and Dr. Rowen, taking both back to their spaceship in orbit.
While Jason is put on a dissection slab, a machine that regenerates parts via nanotechnology revives Rowen in the ship's sickbay. She wakes up and all she can talk about is Jason. The group of young, nubile and horny med students on the ship, including the introverted Tsunaron (Chuck Campbell) and his confused android KM-14 (Lisa Ryder) tell her that the big guy they found with her is quite dead and he won't be bothering anyone at all.

They could not have been more wrong.
Shortly after dispatching the dissecting student with liquid nitrogen, Jason does his thing and kills teenagers having sex. Then he pulls an Alien and goes for the shadows. The man responsible for the field trip, medical professor Lowe (Jonathon Potts), brought Space Marines to fill out the body count. These doomed and poorly disciplined soldiers follow Sgt. Brodsky (Peter Mensah), a badass soldier dude who knows how to relax. His troops don't know how to act, so they get chopped up and Brodsky gets injured trying to save them. Or something.
Needless to say, the people on board are scared and have no way of beating Jason. Tsunaron and KM-14 are stuck somewhere and they come up with a plan to defeat the Voorhees menace. The method employed was good, but the after-effects couldn�t have been worse. Upon being blown to bits by an enhanced KM-14, Jason lands on the medical regenerator. Since most of his body was blown away in a hail of gunfire that DIDN'T pierce the hull, the regenerator had to make do with metallic parts. After moments of cutting back and forth between Jason's carcass and the completion gauge, Jason is all crazy-ass cyborg. Some more shit happens and half the ship starts to fall apart. The leftover crew makes it over to the other side of the ship to execute a plan to hold Jason off.
The plan is to use the ship's holographic projector to make a fake Crystal Lake campsite and hold Jason there while they escape in an escape pod. Two holographic sluts, who easily have the best lines in the movie, delay Jason from pursuing the survivors. This scene alone is comedy gold.

Jason breaks free of the hologram and almost has his prey when Brodsky shows up and faces off with Jason. This gives the survivors enough time to escape in an escape pod. Not to be discouraged by a life-or-death battle in space, Jason jumps and lands on the escape pod and tries to kill the survivors. Brodsky's there too and lunged after Jason, knocking him off and fighting him as they both fall into the nearby planet's atmosphere. You'd think this was the end of Jason, the way Rowen, KM-14 and Tsunaron celebrated as if he was finally dead. Such a belief would be the end of you, but not the end of the Friday the 13th franchise.

This movie sucked, yet held an immense entertainment factor. It's not a great horror film or even a good B-movie; but it has to be one of the best comedies I've seen in a while.