Four friends are backpacking across Europe, when their bus breaks down in rural Bulgaria they hike through a forest where they find an ancient sword stuck in a rock. One of the guys pulls it out and in doing so unwittingly unleashes an evil creature - the Rock Monster! The title alone should serve as a warning to potential viewers that classic monster movie this is not! I can't say much good about this made for TV film I'm afraid. Despite being set in a remote Bulgarian village everyone there seems to speak or understand English quite fluently, I'd have been happy to have had some Bulgarian dialogue coupled with subtitles but I guess so many viewers for these type of films are too lazy to read them. To its credit there are several Bulgarian actors in the cast. However a stunning barmaid called Cassandra (Natalie Denise Sperl) says that she'd love to go to the USA, judging by her "Romanian" accent I think it fair to say that she's already spent much time there! Amongst the cast we get non-actors to established actors, Jon Polito being the prime example of the latter though he really hams it up as a former communist military general. As for the Rock Monster itself the usually horrid CGI "special" effects are fairly reasonable plus there is a gore highlight in which a man quite literally loses the top of his head. There is a lot of romance plus a bit of comedy in the plot but I would like to have seen more horror, I found it rather boring.
