Color Out of Space (2020)
Not rated
Score: 4 out of 5
Color Out of Space, an adaptation of the story by H. P. Lovecraft starring Nicolas Cage, comes from a lot of the same people who were behind Mandy a couple of years ago... and that right there is the sentence that got my ass in the theater. Lovecraft was one of the greatest and most impactful writers of horror fiction in the 20th century, his stories of humanity being tiny and powerless in the face of cosmic evil influencing the likes of Stephen King, Alan Moore, and Neil Gaiman among numerous others, and while... some parts of his writing haven't aged well (if you know the first thing about Lovecraft, you probably know exactly what I'm alluding to here), most of his stories haven't lost their capacity to chill and frighten. Cage, meanwhile, is an actor who, even though he's now a walking meme, hasn't forgotten how to deliver the kinds of great performances that once made him an A-lister, oftentimes precisely because of the qualities that make his "crazy" acting so meme-worthy. And Mandy, one of Cage's best recent films, was a trippy mind-fuck of vibrant visuals and creeping dread punctuated by some truly messed-up moments. In other words, not even a 45-minute drive down to the O Cinema in South Beach, where Popcorn Frights was running a screening last Friday night, was going to stop me from checking this out.
And yeah, it was good. Some of the storytelling and characters were a bit iffy, but overall, if you're gonna make a movie that captures the feel of a Lovecraft story, watching this is a good primer on how to do it right. It looked astonishingly good in light of its fairly small budget, its baddies feeling truly alien and mysterious while still supplying some grotesque body-horror straight out of The Thing. Cage stole the show as the lead, and the rest of the cast were no slouches either. It at times had a sick sense of humor that put a smile on my face while doing nothing to lessen the horror on display. And above all else, it made it hard to look at the night sky in quite the same way, not without wondering what monstrosities could be lurking up there. A great feeling to have when you're driving home at one in the morning and the night sky takes up much of your field of view.
Set in rural Massachusetts, we start the film following the Gardners: the dad Nathan, the mom Theresa, the Wiccan teenage daughter Lavinia, the pot-smoking teenage son Benny, and the adolescent son Jack. After Theresa survived a bout with cancer that forced her to get a mastectomy, they all moved out to a family farm that Nathan's father once owned in order to get away from the big city. One night, a strange, glowing meteor crash-lands on their front lawn, and soon after, things spiral out of anyone's control. A strange force starts emanating from the crater where the meteorite mysteriously sunk into the ground, causing plants and animals on the farm to start mutating while causing headaches, blackouts, and more in the Gardners. Ward Phillips, a hydrologist surveying the area in advance of the construction of a reservoir, also starts to notice the weird happenings on the Gardner farm, and soon gets caught up in their struggle to survive the alien presence that the meteor brought with it.
Ward serves as the audience viewpoint character, a composite of the book's narrator and Ammi Pierce, the old man who tells him the story of what happened to the Gardner farm. While he gets some things to do during the third act, for much of the movie he's a fairly passive figure who merely observes the strange events going on. The real main characters are the Gardners, and as the film goes on, it becomes clear that this is not a particularly happy family. Nathan has grown obsessed with becoming a farmer even though he's not particularly good at it, Theresa (a financial adviser) is losing clients because of the lousy internet service at the house, Benny spends most of his time getting high and hanging out with the nearby hippie hermit Ezra, Lavinia is trying to use magic to heal her mother, and Jack has grown extremely withdrawn. The first act plays out more like a domestic drama than a horror movie, as the Gardners deal with both their personal struggles and the complications caused by the meteor that came down on their property, the alien forces around them only apparent to viewers who know the score. It takes the Gardners a long time to realize that the meteor was carrying something nasty behind it; before that happens, all the strange things that happen to them could be chalked up to their isolation in the woods, to Benny forgetting to lock up the alpacas in the barn again, to Theresa still recovering from her treatment, or to any number of mundane causes.
This ain't Hereditary, though. It is made perfectly clear to the viewers, through the character of Ward, that something truly fucked up is going on here. The alien flora and fauna that slowly infests the Gardner farm is highlighted early on, starting out with red flowers and alien-looking mantises appearing around the crater and the well before the Gardners themselves start to be made sick from the meteorite's influence. Electronics like cell phones, TVs, and computers start going haywire. By the third act, the farm has started to transform into a truly alien landscape, with a pink mist in the air, the branches of trees moving like tentacles, and the nonplussed reaction of the Gardners to all these changes an indication of how they themselves are being corrupted by its influence. And that's without getting into the truly nasty stuff that the color from outer space does to the animals and later the Gardners, nor the indications that (in true Lovecraftian tradition) the alien force is part of something far greater than just this one rock with its weird color. Director Richard Stanley, maker of the '90s cult horror films Hardware and Dust Devil, gives this film an astonishing look, turning its rural New England landscape into something truly out of this world.
Yes, Nicolas Cage does get to "Cage out" as the movie progresses, his character's transformation from a stressed-out but loving family man into a Lovecraftian hero showcasing both his great serious acting chops and the manic flair that his performances are famous for, perfect qualities for a Lovecraftian protagonist. His Nathan is a man who's going crazy at what's happening to him, his family, and his farm, but can't figure out precisely what in the world is causing those changes until it's well past too late, for himself and everyone around him. Between this, Mandy, and Mom and Dad, it seems that the best use of Cage in a movie is where he's far from the most over-the-top element, but instead meshes well with the other varieties of madness on display. Joely Richardson also gets a lot to do as Theresa, the one who arguably suffers the most from the alien color's malign influence (an accident in the kitchen being just the start), and while Tommy Chong was only in a couple of scenes, he was a show-stealer in both of them. The kids, however, were something of a mixed bag. Lavinia got some interesting stuff to do as the one who turns to black magic to solve the problem, adding some texture to the otherwise fairly vanilla final girl role, but Jack had little to do beyond play the creepy kid, and Benny, without spoiling anything, makes a breathtakingly stupid decision late in the film that almost had me screaming at the theater screen. The biggest disappointment came with Ward, a character whose sole purpose is to deliver exposition and save the day at the end even though it seemed at various points that he had more going on beneath the surface. His relationship with Lavinia in particular is something I'd have liked to see fleshed out, as it would've fleshed out the both of them and added more urgency to Ward's efforts to save the Gardners. As it stands, though, his minor role early in the film meant that him suddenly becoming a much more important character late in the film didn't quite ring true for me.
This ain't Hereditary, though. It is made perfectly clear to the viewers, through the character of Ward, that something truly fucked up is going on here. The alien flora and fauna that slowly infests the Gardner farm is highlighted early on, starting out with red flowers and alien-looking mantises appearing around the crater and the well before the Gardners themselves start to be made sick from the meteorite's influence. Electronics like cell phones, TVs, and computers start going haywire. By the third act, the farm has started to transform into a truly alien landscape, with a pink mist in the air, the branches of trees moving like tentacles, and the nonplussed reaction of the Gardners to all these changes an indication of how they themselves are being corrupted by its influence. And that's without getting into the truly nasty stuff that the color from outer space does to the animals and later the Gardners, nor the indications that (in true Lovecraftian tradition) the alien force is part of something far greater than just this one rock with its weird color. Director Richard Stanley, maker of the '90s cult horror films Hardware and Dust Devil, gives this film an astonishing look, turning its rural New England landscape into something truly out of this world.
Yes, Nicolas Cage does get to "Cage out" as the movie progresses, his character's transformation from a stressed-out but loving family man into a Lovecraftian hero showcasing both his great serious acting chops and the manic flair that his performances are famous for, perfect qualities for a Lovecraftian protagonist. His Nathan is a man who's going crazy at what's happening to him, his family, and his farm, but can't figure out precisely what in the world is causing those changes until it's well past too late, for himself and everyone around him. Between this, Mandy, and Mom and Dad, it seems that the best use of Cage in a movie is where he's far from the most over-the-top element, but instead meshes well with the other varieties of madness on display. Joely Richardson also gets a lot to do as Theresa, the one who arguably suffers the most from the alien color's malign influence (an accident in the kitchen being just the start), and while Tommy Chong was only in a couple of scenes, he was a show-stealer in both of them. The kids, however, were something of a mixed bag. Lavinia got some interesting stuff to do as the one who turns to black magic to solve the problem, adding some texture to the otherwise fairly vanilla final girl role, but Jack had little to do beyond play the creepy kid, and Benny, without spoiling anything, makes a breathtakingly stupid decision late in the film that almost had me screaming at the theater screen. The biggest disappointment came with Ward, a character whose sole purpose is to deliver exposition and save the day at the end even though it seemed at various points that he had more going on beneath the surface. His relationship with Lavinia in particular is something I'd have liked to see fleshed out, as it would've fleshed out the both of them and added more urgency to Ward's efforts to save the Gardners. As it stands, though, his minor role early in the film meant that him suddenly becoming a much more important character late in the film didn't quite ring true for me.
The Bottom Line
While a bit of a messy film where its supporting cast is concerned, Color Out of Space still marks a great start to my 2020 moviegoing experience. Even if you're not a Lovecraft fan, if you're in the mood for offbeat horror that nonetheless doesn't hold back, check this one out when it hits video.
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