It's always a bad sign when a film was produced in 1977, but not even officially released in its home country until 1986. That means the producers of DARK ECHOES had a finished product, but thought it would be a waste of everyone's time to even release it. Ouch! Indeed, DARK ECHOES is pretty much a complete waste of your time; it's not scary, not entertaining and a much, much inferior version of THE FOG or SHOCK WAVES.
Many moons ago in a small lakeside Austrian town, Captain Manfred Gohr led a failed voyage which ended with his ship at the bottom of the water. The townspeople have always blamed the captain for the sinking, and as fitting for a man named Manfred Gohr, he comes back as a zombie with excellent swimming skills and terrorizes his old home. It's up to the police chief and a martini-swigging detective who can see the future for some reason to save the day!
If you decide to unearth DARK ECHOES from its deserved obscurity, prepare for an endless stream of badly written conversation scenes for the first hour of the film. Watch a detective get a ride from a nice teenager! Watch the mayor discuss the town with the local barkeep! Listen to a bunch of people with radically different accents all speak English in an Austrian town! Not only are the scenes dull as dishwater, they are poorly written as well, so you get plenty of wonderful lines like, "You may be the world's worst reprobate, but you're loyal!"
The deaths are almost all off-screen, there's a random cult subplot that never explains itself, and the climax is a dull whimper of an ending. While you do get one fun decapitation, a gooey villain and some wonderful lakeside scenery, it's hard not to spend most of DARK ECHOES' running time daydreaming about a Balkan vacation. It's probably better than ZOMBIE LAKE, but so is gouging out your own eyes.
Skip it. 3 out of 10, +1 for a sick score that deserves a vinyl re-mastering!
