It’s fine it’s just not quite as impressive as its predecessor. Wilmarth’s home and university life are neatly, if perhaps needlessly, depicted. The conversations with the minds in canisters are a lot of fun, and the Akeley conversations in general are good. Well, it’s still an amazing project, and it has some wonderfully atmospheric scenes. It also spends a fair amount of time in its first act on setup that doesn’t really go anywhere - one wonders if there’s a sequel planned! What’s right with it? It has that problem where in order for the hero to triumph the monsters have to look like a bunch of chumps. The ending action scene is just beyond the production’s means, and unfortunately that means there are places it looks ridiculous, with monsters just sort of looming menacingly near Wilmarth. There’s more wrong with Whisperer than Call in proportion to its greater ambition. The aliens themselves are represented by some pretty ropey effects, and you can see how much the earlier film benefited from its intentionally stylised look. There’s a debate with Charles Fort (Leman) at the beginning and a long, slam-bang action sequence at the end, together with the setup of a group of … well, of Call of Cthulhu investigators that never really goes anywhere. Here, they’ve tried to turn the story into something more like a Universal film of the 1930s, which means adding quite a lot of new material. The HPLHS’s previous project, The Call of Cthulhu, was a very story-accurate adaptation of the tale into a silent film. And don’t forget to bring all the evidence! It’s a trap, from which Wilmarth barely escapes, but the real centre of the story is the scene where Wilmarth sits in a darkened room, talking to Akeley and gradually starting to realise that all is not as it seems. The evidence becomes more and more convincing - but suddenly, Akeley tells Wilmarth that he got it all wrong and invites him to visit him in Vermont. He gets into correspondence with a farmer, Henry Akeley, who claims to have proof. Written in 1930 and published in 1931, “The Whisperer in Darkness” tells the tale of Albert Wilmarth, a professor at good ol’ Miskatonic University who is initially skeptical of claims that alien beings inhabit remote Vermont hills. Starring Matt Foyer, Barry Lynch and Andrew Leman
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