Color, 1976, 100m. / Directed by Marcello Aliprandi / Starring Nathalie Delon, John Phillip Law, Joseph Cotten, Alessandro Poggi, Adriana Russo / NoShame (Italy R0 NTSC) / WS (1.85:1) (16:9)
Barely seen outside Italy for decades, A Whisper in the Dark gets a very solid English-language launch from NoShame on DVD. The film itself looks quite impressive, on par with their previous releases; the rich color schemes (reminiscent of similar compositions in The Perfume of the Lady in Black) are often striking and make the film a constant visual delight. The disc contains both the English and Italian tracks, the latter playable with optional English subtitles; however, the English audio is by far the superior option. The cast is clearly speaking English with Law, Cotten and Delon providing their own voices; also, one character's French accent and lessons to the children in that language only make sense in the English version. Though the director passed away in 1997, cinematographer Claudio Cirillo is on hand to provide a brief video introduction and a solid interview featurette, "Whispering Corridors," in which he talks primarily about working with Aliprandi. Also included are the original Italian trailer and a poster/still gallery, as well as a booklet containing talent bios and an essay on the Italian gothic cinema tradition.
One of the more obscure entries in the Italian "spooky kids" trend sparked by The Exorcist, this atmospheric chiller ignores the increasingly graphic demands of 1970s horror and attempts a character-driven, psychological ghost story.
Though uneven, the results are certainly worth watching and generate their fair share of thrills. The mayhem starts at a sprawling villa in the Italian countryside where young son Martino (Poggi) pays an uncommon amount of attention to his imaginary playmate, Luca, and casually announces to his family that he's been having spooky dreams about graveyards. Soon mother Camilla (Delon) and the rest of the family are unnerved by a series of freak accidents and pranks, including freak storms, car problems, and toads lurking in the bubble bath. The fey, philandering father Alex (Law) - who doesn't do much besides lounging around in tacky leisurewear and playing backgammon - fails to see the urgency of these occurrences, sending Camilla for aid from a venerable psychiatrist (Cotten) who relays the disturbing news that the villa is haunted by the ghost of her stillborn second child, who isn't happy about being left out from his potential family.
Queasy fundamentalist implications of the storyline aside, A Whisper in the Dark is an entertaining if not overtly terrifying supernatural yarn from director Marcello Aliprandi in his only horror outing. Best known for the ridiculously trashy nudist comedy Skin Deep (and less so for the middling Vatican COnspiracy), he displays a sure eye for visual detail in his films and benefits from solid scores by Pino Donaggio, with this film no exception. (Too bad a soundtrack was never released, making this one of the very few vintage Donaggio scores held back in the vaults.) Aliprandi also injects the film with a surprising amount of humor, ranging from Law's tacky and ineffectual bourgeois dad to colorful character bit parts along the way. (Unfortunately some of the chuckles, such as the hysterically overwrought, frontally nude toad tub scene, 
appear to be unintentional.) As far as Italian ghost stories go, this can't hold a flickering candle to Mario Bava's similar Shock the following year but it's still a worthy and intriguing spooker worth checking out with the lights turned down low. The second half is particularly effective (basically once Cotten enters the picture), complete with a creepy Venetian masked ball sequence that delivers subdued shivers by the mere power of visual suggestion.
