Format:	Movie
By:	Richard Stanley (Director) H.P. Lovecraft, Richard Stanley, Scarlett Amaris (Writers)
Genre:	Horror
Released:	January 24, 2020
Review Date:	February 24, 2020
Audience Rating:	Not Rated
RevSF Rating:	6/10 (What Is This?)

Movies based on the works of H. P. Lovecraft can be a squirrelly bunch. Some, like the HPLHS’s The Call of Cthulhu have almost no budget, but are labors of love that capture what draws us to Howard’s weird tales. Others, like Re-Animator, use his stories as a springboard, which don’t quite truly adapt the work, but once again, get the core ingredients right enough, so you end up with an enjoyable scary flick. And others, like Castle Freak, go off in their own direction, with debatable results.

Then there are the movies just “inspired” by his works, and going over that list could take days. So I’ll just move on (*cough The Thing, Cast a Deadly Spell *cough*).

The biggest problem with adapting HPL to film is that, to be honest, a lot of what pulls us to his work is, frankly, unfilmable. It’s all about the tone; the mood; it’s being inside someone’s head as reality comes unglued in ways that tears a character’s mind apart. It can be done, but it takes skill. It’s just a lot easier to make a big rubber monster, dip it in slime, then let it run wild as people scream “Ia! Ia!” while running around with Elder Signs painted on rocks. Though, sometimes, I’m there for that.

However, when someone really gets the material, and puts in the effort to make sure that its done right, you can get a true horror classic.

Color Out of Space is . . . not in that category.

This is actually the third attempt to adapt one of HPL’s most famous (and in my opinion, one of his best) works. Of the movies that have tried to tell this story (Die, Monster, Die! from 1967 with Karloff, and The Curse from 1987 with Wil Wheaton), this one is the third. And probably the best of the batch. Which, sadly, isn’t saying a whole lot.

The basics of the story are as follows. A nice farmer family living in the deep part of the woods have their life upended when a strange meteor crashes onto their property. It’s a strange, soft stone that slowly dissolves into the soil, and is a color that we have never seen before on Earth. This color acts like a strange radiation, mutating the land, the plants, animals, and then the farm family into bizarre, twisted, horrifying creatures

This version of the tale comes to us from Richard Stanley (The Island of Dr. Moreau) and Academy Award Winner© Nicolas Cage. With this pedigree, I was hoping that we would get the same level of otherworldly high weirdness we saw in Mandy. But we only get a few glimpses of that Cage here. He does a pretty reserved performance for most of the movie as Nathan Gardner, a man who has moved his family to this rural farm in the wake of his wife Theresa’s (Joely Richardson) cancer treatments, hoping that the quiet will help her recover, help their marriage, and that raising alpacas for their milk and fur will keep them afloat.

Their three kids are Lavinia (Madeleine Arthur), their rebellious teen daughter who is dipping her toes into Wicca; Benny (Brendan Meyer) the stoner teen son; and precocious young Jack (Julian Hilliard), who is a bit nerdy, and a bit weird. We also have Tommy Chong as, well, Tommy Chong, living in a trailer at the edge of the farm.

Everyone does what they can with the roles, especially at the start where it follows the template of “city family moves to the country and tries to adapt” formula. Cage’s Nathan is obviously out of his depth, but Cage plays him with an awkward charm. You believe how much he still loves his family, and is trying to make his wife believe that her recent trauma hasn’t changed how much he cares about her.

Then the meteor shows up, and things get weird. But not weird enough. Weird in ways that make you go “huh?” more than going “augh!”

There are only two or three times where Cage gets to let out the really crazy side we’re waiting on, and while a more restrained performance is usually a good thing, it hinders more than it helps here. Especially when Lavinia goes full cultist crazy, carving runes into herself in an attempt to battle back against whatever is happening to her family.

When Cage isn’t the craziest character in your HPL movie, something has gone wrong somewhere.

Still, there are a few reasons to watch the movie. As I mentioned, the performances are pretty consistently good across the board, the effects are cool, and the choice to make the Color a pink/purple/violet works, providing some stunning visuals. And the scene where Cage is interviewed by the local news team about the strange visitor from another planet is hilarious.

As an adaptation of the original story, the movie hits most of the beats pretty well, and fans of the work should find the movie of interest. Fans of Cage will also probably enjoy this as well, even with it being one of his tamer performances. And horror fans will most likely think that it’s ok.

In the end, I thought that Color Out of Space was decent, but a little bit of a let down when all was said and done. I didn’t regret watching it, but it’s not a movie that I will be coming back to again any time soon.

If they had leaned harder into being weird, or let Cage get a little more . . . Cage-y as the world twisted around him, I would have enjoyed it more. It feels like it tried to split the difference, to be both a character study and Mandy-ish, and ended up being weaker because of not committing to being either a subdued character piece, or full Cage crazy.

Gary Mitchel is a frightful messenger from unformed realms of infinity beyond all Nature as we know it; from realms whose mere existence stuns the brain and numbs us with the black extra-cosmic gulfs it throws open before our frenzied eyes.