Dark Rising

Dark Rising (2007): Here is a pretty low budget feature with a nebulous plot, average acting, and rather bland characters; but for some reason I rather enjoyed watching this one. I guess the sum of the parts was greater than the whole or something like that. The story goes something like this; hotly guy goes on a camping trip with ex-girlfriend and her girlfriend and his guy friend and one other brainier, though still hotly young lady. They take great pains to show you that his ex has switched sides and is now firmly entrenched in the les-bonean camp. They even show an all gal grappling session early in the movie in order to point out this fact to the slow learners in the audience. Meanwhile our semi-studly hero can’t see the writing on the wall and continues swooning over his ex. The shapely but still brainy gal has a book with words that should not be spoken but are which opens a portal to another dimension where upon a monster steps through and starts murder and mayhem. But wait, a beautiful lass wearing a metallic winged headdress and little else saves the day by wielding a mean battle axe and injuring the beast. It turns out she was sucked into the other dimension as a little girl when her father read from the same book and learned the hard way how to fight the creatures. Apparently, her sewing skills did not pass beyond the bikini design stage in the other dimension but this was probably a good thing for the male portion of the audience.
The group now has to figure a way to get the monster sucked back into his dimension since he cannot be killed here on Earth. You must not think about the details of this plot too much because it will make little sense and cause your head to ache, but the cast is all good looking and the princess warrior looks just great in her battle outfit so who really cares if it makes much sense. Ok, I cut this flick far more slack than I should have, but it just grew on me, kind of like a tumor. If you put your mind in neutral, you may enjoy this low budget effort. The movie was unrated but would probably pull an R out of the other dimension for: gratuitous les-bean grappling, multiple orbulations, hotly warrior princess, ugly monster, punctured les-beans, and for excessive battle axing and blood flinging.