Dark Rising

Title: Dark Rising
Rating: 3/5
Genre: Horror, Comedy, Sci Fi
Starring: Landy Cannon, Brigitte Kingsley, Julia Schneider
Director: Andrew Cymek

A straight-to-DVD that came as a pleasant surprise; too often they either feel incredibly cliché or attempt comedy, filling the story with an unrelenting quest for bad puns at the expense of the genre. Not here. The script itself for the most part is serious in the manner it unfolds – despite the often comical situations – using the acting to intentionally push things a touch further than many other horrors would, removing any notion of being scary in favour for an amusing campiness at times reminding me of the witty lines from “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” This isn’t a collection of bad puns held together by a bad plot, the plot itself allows the humour to emerge.

Taking the lead is the smitten Jason (Cannon), desperate to re-kindle his love with his high school sweetheart Jasmine. It is perhaps unfortunate that since leaving him she has discovered lesbianism with Marlene, without his knowledge of course. Taking friends Ricky (Jason Reso) and Renée (Schneider) with them to a place of powerful energy, they go camping in the wilderness. Renée, Marlene and Jasmine, as aspiring witches go off to read from the ancient book of Black Magic, though only Renée is more interested in casting spells than locking lips with each other, she alone unwittingly opens the portal to an alternate dimension, bringing forth evil hellspawn and the long lost Summer Vale (Kingsley), and it falls on the troop to send the demon back to where it came from.

The acting was fairly bad, but what separated them all from the dregs of the genre is their ability to retain a character more detailed than ‘victim #1,’ from the cowardly Ricky (an ex-wrestler debuting in film), the crazy evil bitch Jasmine, the bookworm Renée and smitten lead character of Jason, they wont be winning any awards any time soon but they perform their role in a manner that feels fitting with the persona they created. There were a number of laugh-out-loud moments (which with my normal disposition against comedy is fairly rare), and whilst as many fell flat this becomes less important as you become drawn into the story itself. The demon was built on a shoestring budget, influenced heavily by the suited creations from the ‘Evil Dead’ series which served its purpose superbly.

Now don’t get me wrong, this is by far from a perfect film, there are still a number of issues to contend with from the occasional plot hole, the odd superfluous (though particularly in the lesbian scene, not entirely unwelcome) scene, the wooden acting and at times cliché characters and generic soundtrack lends a predictability to the altogether bizarre tale. Many may criticise the lack of an explanation for many of the situations, or the lack of decent action scenes, but take it for the campy B-Movie’ that it is and you should find it worthy of going up there with the work produced by ‘the Sci-Fi channel.