Monsterfest 2019: COLOR OUT OF SPACE

What do you get if you mix HP Lovecraft, late-period Nicholas Cage, and Richard Stanley, a director who hasn’t made a movie since he was fired four days into making the infamous Island of Dr Moreau in 1996? You get Color Out of Space, a semi-psychedelic monster movie about aliens, possession, family and alpacas.

Stanley

Richard Stanley’s claim to fame is now probably the movie he didn’t get to make. Documented in the seminal Lost Souls, Stanley got the gig to adapt his favourite book, HG Wells’ The Island of Dr Moreau, only to find his work sabotaged by a variety of factors, mostly the bad behaviour of two of his leads: Val Kilmer and Marlon Brando. Fired from the production after four days, Stanley fled into the Australian bush while the movie spiraled out of control under the ‘leadership’ of John Frankenheimer.

Color Out of Space is Stanley’s first feature film since that awful experience and it is clear very early on, that the horror community has been missing a very much needed voice in the genre.

The movie is about the Gardner family, who are living in a house in the woods, formerly owned by Cage’s overbearing late father. Cage has decided to farm alpacas as the animal of the future though no one is keen to drink their milk or eat their meat. His wife, Theresa, played by Joely Richardson, works online and is recovering from cancer, while his daughter (Madeline Arthur) practices Wiccan witchcraft and his sons (Brendan Myer and Julian Hillard) smoke weed and is a little kid, respectively.

They are a standard semi-happy, slightly argumentative family, until a meteorite lands in their yard and starts giving off a strange vibrant hue of colour that begins to infect and change the area and people around it.

Cage

With Nicholas Cage, you roll the dice on what kind of performance you’re going to get. He’s capable of heroics, villainy, insanity, desperation, and mania all at once, and its up to a savvy director to rein him in and point him in the right direction.

Stanley clearly knows the Cage he wants. For the first act, Cage is a nerdy dad who has taken a big risk on alpacas and worries about turning into his own father. He is trying to look after his kids and reassure his wife that post-cancer she is still the woman of his dreams.

Once the meteorite hits and things begin to unravel he becomes very, very strange. Aggressive, sarcastic, and cruel, Cage adopts a very accurate (and pretty distracting) impression of the speaking patterns of Donald Trump. Nasally, smug, and full of barely restrained resentment at the world, Cage, possibly knowingly, channels the 45^th president to create a very different character to the one we meet at the start of the movie.

And as with a majority of Cage performances, you’re either with it or you aren’t. I was, and the audience I watched this movie with definitely were. Cage is having fun with the performance, but there is also a lot of menace in it too.

Color Out of Space: Conclusion

Color Out of Space is a horror movie, a sci-fi movie, a creature feature, and comedy of sorts. Cage’s performance verges on the ridiculous, though he manages to keep a grasp on it before it veers completely into Vampire’s Kiss territory.

The big stand out of the movie is in its design. Once the meteorite has hit and the colour begins to seep out of it, otherworldly hues of purple, red, and blue begin to fill the screen, taking over the fauna and the sky. It reminded me of 1978’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers in which we find as the movie goes along the sound design begins to remove any natural or organic sounds, replacing them with the mechanical. In Color Out of Space, the titular colour begins to creep in at the edges all throughout the movie until it has completely engulfed the characters and their home.

Hopefully, this movie heralds a return of Richard Stanley, a man given short shrift and who has a great eye for throwback horror and truly creepy cinema.

Watch Color Out of Space