I've seen the HPLHS 'Whisperer in Darkness' [Spoilers]

[Max_Writer]

I liked it. I think it's already been said somewhere that the meeting at MU had the feel of the beginning of a CoC investigation. I'm also very happy that there was no love scene, love interest, or the like.

[ScS]

I really liked Whisperer, and I especially loved the first couple of scenes. It was a great idea to introduce Wilmarth and the manuscript via the short investigation scene. The story reminded me of Tales from the Crypt: Wilmarth ventures out to disprove aliens, and becomes a believer. I also liked the ultimate ending of the film. It was a great way to sum up the story.
The mi-go were fantastic! Dare I say that the model maker truly broke the mold? The Mi-go have been so frequently illustrated but the Fungi from Yuggoth looked nothing like something drawn by human hands. The alien things were... indescribable! Literally – I can only describe them in broken metaphors and similes. Crabs, insects, machines, men? The film makes the audience into H.P.L. narrators!
On a final note, though Wilmarth never confronted the Crawling Chaos, this film did not lack a Mighty Messenger. Charlie Tower was the perfect Nyarlathotep! I absolutely loved the power he had over everyone and the smug manner in which he indulged their scientific curiosities to their ultimate damnation, all the while mocking them with his blasé attitude.
P.S. He should have been named Trevor Towers as tribute to both the story Celephasis and to Chad Fifer’s secret film career.

[spookyparadigm]

Finally saw it (even though I got it from HPLHS when it came out. I've been busy). I loved a lot of the first 3/4s of the film. But I concur with a number of the reviews above and elsewhere that the departures from the story were disappointing. Not because "HOW DARE THEY MAKE CHANGES," I understood a lot of the changes, liked some of them. Instead, it was the change in tone, in two ways. One is the obvious one mentioned by a number of people that the end felt a lot like a session of Call of Cthulhu, and while that game was instrumental in making me a Lovecraft fan and I've enjoyed it quite a deal, at this stage, for me, that isn't a plus.

The larger change was that in this last act, the Mi-Go went from being somewhat malevolent, mostly elusive mysterious things reminiscent of folklore, to straight up brain-sucking alien invaders from beyond (and even worse, in cahoots with a beyond pastiche to the point of parody cult)! It made them better movie antagonists, so I guess that really shouldn't be a criticism, but nonetheless, it makes them less interesting than the much more ambiguous aliens of the story (also, while the story certainly supports the reading that they are nasty and malevolent, there is at least some of the ambiguity that makes one understand Wilmarth's confusion (might they actually show one horrible vistas and wonders, a fate that is insane to contemplate but still something more than just being awful to us?). In the film, not so much).

Not to be negative (because it is a good adaptation, just not the mind-blower that I found the HPLHS' Call of Cthulhu to be), let me list some of the surprising or just generally good positives

- The quality of the production was far superior to The Call of Cthulhu, and much better than I expected. In particular, the debate scene and subsequent reception made the film feel far bigger
- The shooting on location was very nice, given how important landscape is to most of HPL's works (intriguingly, it isn't so important to "The Call of Cthulhu")
- The centerpiece of the original story, the conversation with Akeley, wasn't all that much info-dump wise, and this is probably a good idea. Instead, it was far, far creepier, because of Barry Lynch's performance, but above all else, those horrible sounds. More than anything else in the movie, those sounds were spot on
- While I wasn't a huge fan of Noyes (especially as the movie progressed), his initial bizarre mannerisms strongly suggested that in at least this instance, I was glad the film-makers drew on later alien lore and made him not just a suspicious man in a black suit, but a Man in Black in the Bender-Barker-Keel tradition (which of course itself is massively Lovecraftian, so this is probably all a big circle, but a good one).
- Reading ScS's post above, I did not catch the notion that Tower was Nyarlathotep, but that makes a lot of sense, actually. I thought the emphasis on him was a red herring, laying the groundwork for a "He's really the master vampire/Mi-Go Cultist!" moment at the end, which was then played as a red herring with that biplane scene. But now, yeah, there's a good chance he's Nyarlathotep in a reference only Lovecraft fans will get. I'm not much a fan of Nyarlathotep at all outside of the story of that name, and I pretty much dislike every iteration of the character in the role-playing game with perhaps the exception of his off-screen role in a certain musical tale. But here, he is indeed sort of in the spirit of Lovecraft's uses of the name.

[Sanity Schmanity]

I got this over the Xmas season and just watched it last night and I thought it was way better than it had any right to be. Remarkably well done. I thought they did a fantastic job on the "alien tech" elements. The brain jar machines were genuinely creepy. I didn't mind the changes they made to the story. Given limited resources I don't see how they could have done much better. The Mi-go were suitably weird and I liked the "Mars attacks" quality of the story. The cult was cheesy, but I find that to be the case in almost every movie that features a cult-like group performing rituals - even the classic satanic cult stuff. It rarely seems to come off as anything other than silly. I think perhaps the ritual scene would have benifitted from a closer and less "clean" camera perspective. Had it featured more close-ups on the cultists and more darkness/graininess it might have worked better. It suffered a bit from feeling really small in scale I think...

[ScS]

Did anyone else find the extras?

I found the Black Pharaoh to be an especially essential addition.