Overview: A year after the mysterious disappearance of an 8 year-old girl, her grieving family return home from her memorial service in their small town.

Later that evening, strange lights appear in the nearby forest and the family is exposed to a strange, inexplicable phenomenon that rattles them to the core.

DVD: Combining a truly atmospheric, and at times achingly orchestral backbeat to each scene along with panoramic landscape shots and acting (most times without saying a word) that is top notch, everything about 'Dark Encounter' is a blessing to behold for us fans of the genre.

Writer/Director Carl Strathie brings us a marvelous sci-fi adventure that features Laura Fraser (Breaking Bad) at its helm along with a whole host of other fine actors.

The no frills storyline revolves around a family returning home from a memorial service in their small town a year after their 8 year-old girl, Massie has gone missing.

Still deep in mourning, they are suddenly faced with strange sights and strange encounters, all seemingly punctuated and brought forth by some very strange lights in the sky.

What Strathie manages to do here is steer the premise and visuals away from a latter day 'Close Encounters Of The Third Kind' and toward a fresh take on the sci-fi genre via adept, and focused storytelling from the off.

For 'Dark Encounter' is not just only about this particular day of remembrance, and the fight for survival that comes a'calling thereafter, but constructed around that aforementioned sense of style and nurtured visual effects, the film also manages to rise up out of the B-movie stockades into one that masterfully belies its monetary constraints.

Containing many surprises, jump starts and even an embedded message for those watching, it's also important you know that the horror element of 'Dark Encounter' is strictly limited to being of the human emotion side of things. So those seeking blood, guts and more blood, well, this most certainly isn't the movie for you!

Complete with a side step plot twist that you will never see coming, I was personally so mesmerized by this film that I couldn't even pause it to answer my phone (I just let it ring out!).

The special effects are really rather good for what is obviously being presented as a B-movie, but what is way more intrguing to me about it all is how your mind starts to second guess all you know, all you believe as the movie reveals itself.

I mean, just when you think it couldn't get any more intruiging, something comes along, sometimes something so dark that it has you reeling, both mentally and physically.

In closing, 'Dark Encounter' is a movie that deserves to find a wide audience and given that it pays a loving homage along the way to previous "encounter" movies, I would hope that those that enjoyed them will lovingly feast on this one also. This is a Widescreen Presentation (2.39:1) enhanced for 16x9 TVs.

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