Dark Echoes (1977)

 

Director: George Robotham

Screenplay: George Robotham

Cast: Karin Dor as Lisa Bruekner; Joel Fabiani as Bill Cross; Wolfgang Brook as Inspector Woelke; Hanna Landy as Frau Ziemler; John Robotham as Dieter Beckmann; Norman Marshall as Captain Gohr; Frederick Tully as Officer Braun; James Dobson as Officer Garth; Alexander Davion as Dereck Stanhope

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

A lake with a curse is established in the beginning of Dark Echoes, leading to two older male fishermen dying in a strange drowning accident and the film, shot between Slovenia and Austria, setting out an eerie tone of a piece out-of-time. Cold chills warn those too late of what attacks, apt for a film steeped in its eerie synthesiser score by Sanja Ilic and Slobodan Markovic. A film between European aesthetic locations, Germanic uniforms on the officials to its locations used for the production, the scenario is set up as so severe an American clairvoyant has to be brought in by the local law enforcement. This figure is introduced in an abrupt turn into a commercial for skiing, also evident the composters' score can be proto-vaporwave as, with compliment, their music can turn on a dime into a score for travel advertisements. This is not that strange when one learns to co-composter Slobodan Markovic, born in Belgrade, worked on an entry for the Eurovision Song Contest, 1991 Yugoslavian entry to the Eurovision Song Contest, Brazil, performed by Bebi Dol. Tragically it only got 1 point, coming 21st in the field of 22 competing countries, beating only Austria^1&1b.

An older male psychic from the USA, Bill Cross (Joel Fabiani) is sadly underutilised in terms of his psychic abilities, which seems a plot thread, barring one foreboding image he and we see, that seems actually pointless to have included, among the issues to a film despite its virtues. More so as the character, the real deal, would have been one you could flesh out further than here, deliberately an outsider who instructs a confused European bartender who to mix a martini, eventually the American and the European bonding by way of a good cocktail served in a beer stein. With a potential love-hate relationship with a female journalist Lisa (Karin Dor), and the set up is there. Like many films, dialogue scenes are needed to explain the plot, here about a sea captain blamed for eighty deaths in a sea wreckage accident. This tonal choice is the aspect people dismiss as detraction in many horror films, yet films find themselves feeling they need these scenes as Dark Forces does, to be exposition trying to weave character personality within them, all for our alcohol loving lead able to try to investigate this strange series of deaths among wood panelled walled rooms. The result will put some off because of this, as the film takes its time even at ninety minutes to establish this story this way.

It was a fascinating one-off for director-writer George Robotham, whose career was almost entirely as a stunt man since the 1940s to Mars Attacks! (1996). This means film serials like Batman (1943), the Technicolor fifties era movies like Guys and Dolls (1955), westerns like The Undefeated (1969) as Rock Hudson's double, disaster films of the seventies like The Towering Inferno (1974), to films you would not normally presume would have stunts like Flashdance (1983). As his sole film, one which has been seemingly lost to time barring Japanese VHS tape rips, it is a production caught between its moodier presentation and what is more explicitly more cartoonish in its horror. Mood as nature circles the central place the story takes place in, an isolated town whose cemetery is from the medieval times with its own bone house to store the ancient dead, with an artist who paints the skulls in respect to them, and what is effectively in the subgenre of underwater zombies that films like Zombie Lake (1981) are part of. The amount of dialogue feels like someone making their first (maybe their only) attempt to bring something they wanted to see onto screen, and there is a sense of feeling the story, whilst insanely simple, needed this to flesh the material out. In real life, there would be a lot of discussions for hours in bars by stressed officials, as even Jaws (1975), whilst a blockbuster, was as good as it was as a less supernatural film about dangerous bodies of water, all due to its characters, building them up as neurotic figures, trying to figure out something as less mysterious as a shark and how to stop it.

Here, moments show the paranoia well, of the thing off-screen that growls like a man-wolf, when a German Sheppard barks into the darkness, and the tone of Dark Echoes whilst languid works. It works when it is bordering this tone, aptly requiring one to consult an older wise woman to get more knowledge of this threat, one so at peace with her place crows happily perch on her shoulder. Alongside the few moments of gore too, this is where the one lurid aspect of Dark Echoes ever appears too, as she presides over rituals with robed youths performing ritualistic nude dance orgies, something never returned to, never condemned but the abrupt punch of something more adult to the proceedings until more violence appears.

When the violence does appear, the film finds itself becoming closer to a film like Zombie Lake as a monster film. That was infamously not a good film technically for many about aquatic Nazi zombies, and whilst you do not see the edge of a swimming pool in the underwater footage, which infamously happened in that film, it does feel an apt comparison for better or for worse as this becomes more overtly a b-movie which its set up and languid tone clashes against, entirely about a zombie figure who claws people and is intimidated by his vanity when forced to look in a mirror. Tonally it is a slow work which contrasts this change into this plot tone more, more so as for whatever reason, whilst underwater is a world a world of unnatural and compelling sights in real life, it has a dreary nature when you usually shot it onscreen. Even when a James Bond film like Thunderball (1965) has frogmen armies fighting under the sea, you can find yourself in prolonged scenes which are woozy if you are in the right mood, but are not for everyone, which is also an issue for a film like this when such scenes appear.

Here, finding ourselves with a melted face skull man in a captain's hat, Dark Forces is likable as a film but you also see a film which shows the first cautious (and flawed) attempts of a first time creator. It is still fun, lovable morbid and absurd when an ancestor chews him out for being a murderous coward, or suddenly bringing in a gory decapitation out of nowhere, but this is far from a perfect film at all. It is fascinating to watch, like so many of these obscure horror films are, but this is a case of lowering expectations to be able to appreciate it and get the most from it.

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1) Result of Rome 1991 Eurovision Song Contest, from the official Eurovision website.

1b) Reference to Slobodan Markovic composing the entry for Yugoslavia.