Richard Stanley is a horror film director famous mostly because he was fired from the one great prestige picture on which he was employed. Now 25 years ago, Stanley, regarded as a promising genre film maker was hired to direct The Island of Dr. Moreau, a big-budget studio picture with A-list actors. Things went horribly wrong. Stanley couldn't get the effects that he was attempting to achieve and kept pouring money into the picture in an effort to correct problems that were, apparently, irremediable. He was dismissed from the film which was completed, inadequately, by another director. As with Terry Gillian's efforts to make Don Quixote, a documentary was produced about the debacle, an indictment of economics of making movies that is more famous now than the rather poorly received science fiction picture itself. (The documentary is called Lost Soul: the doomed journey of Richard Stanley's The Isle of Dr. Moreau released in 2014.). Like Orson Welles and Erich von Stroheim, Stanley has the reputation of an auteur too uncompromising to work within the system -- a cinema poet maudit. Therefore, horror film devotees were excited when Stanley directed and released 2019 a film called The Color out of Space starring Nicholas Cage and based, loosely it appears, on H. P. Lovecraft's famous short story. On the evidence of the film, Stanley's reputation is better than his work -- we are more impressed by his legend, I think, than his talent. (It's interesting that Stanley, who is from South Africa, is a direct descendant of the famous explorer of the same name who was rescued by Dr. Livingston.)
The Color out of Space is very standard stuff. An eccentric family lives in big Victorian mansion in the middle of a wild, gloomy forest. (This is supposed to be some place in Massachusetts, but the locations were shot in Sintra, Portugal -- a place where you can hire first-rate film craftsmen without paying Hollywood Union salaries.) Dad is a dreamer who has devoted himself to raising alpacas. In the first, and best part of the film, there's a priceless scene in which Cage milks an alpaca much to the bemusement of a visiting hydrologist. Although the film botches the narrative, from watching deleted scenes, I understand now that the entire gloomy forest is at risk. A big dam is going to be built that will ultimately drown the hero's estate and the various monstrosities spawned there. (Stanley is so slipshod with his plot that he doesn't really explain this in the theatrical version of the film.) One night, a meteor lands at the mansion's front step, a few yards from a spooky ancient well. The meteor smells bad and pretty soon the water in the aquifer is contaminated. The meteor glows hot pink and exhales picturesque purple and pink fumes that everyone inhales. Odd flowers sprout on the lawn and foot long praying mantises emerge from their chrysalises to fly around the premises. The sky glows with an unearthly neon-pink. The last two-thirds of the picture feature, as one might expect, the characters making a series of increasingly bad decisions. First, when mom dreamily amputates a bunch of her fingers, dad takes her to the hospital in Arkham about an hour away and on the other side of the dense impenetrable woods. He leaves his daughter and two sons at the family manor -- this turns out to be a bad idea since monsters are now roaming around causing people to melt into flayed, oozing blobs with terrible agonized faces. When dad comes back, things get even worse -- mom is fused with her five-year old son and melts into a lump of bloody blubber. This is before she sprouts eight-foot-long spider legs and with her son's face embedded in her furry back prances around the attic where dad has confined her -- presumably in the hope that she'll get better somehow. (The sorts of changes that she suffers seem irreversible as far as I can see.) The alpacas get turned into another pustulent blob of goo, albeit with horribly scalded looking alpaca heads braying at the camera. A squatter on the premises, played memorably by the pot-head Tommy Chong (a vigorous and amusing 83 when the film was produced) uses a reel-to-reel tape recorder to cut a few tracks of the monsters whining and howling underground. The teenage daughter, a devotee of the Necronimicon (which has nothing to do with the movie), mutilates herself while chanting weird incantations inside of a bloody pentagram. Oddly enough this seems to protect her from the evil forces that have now turned the whole lawn into a carnival of monstrous insects and bloody-looking scarlet flowers. Her brother decides to crawl down into the well to retrieve the family dog who has also been turned into one of the pulpy goo-monsters. This also is a very bad decision. Finally, Dad has had enough, gets out his shotgun, and decides to finish off some of his family members who, by this time, are in a very bad way. A visiting deputy gets yanked up into a tentacle tree and constrictored to death. The visiting hydrologist finds himself sprawled on the law which is now sprouting innumerable pale white fingers. And so on and so on.
Cage is funny and has some amusing understated lines. Of course, he also gets to go berserk and stick his daughter, who has used a razor to slice pentagrams into her skin everywhere, up in the attic with mom, now metamorphosed into a kind of gory-looking tarantula. By and large, the film is adequate, but not memorable. Some of the creature effects are okay, but Stanley shoots the critters in bad light and in very close shots as if a little embarrassed by his monsters. The film is reasonably creepy, but I scare easily. It's all obviously derived from the really alarming and horrific gold standard in this kind of horror -- John Carpenter's version of The Thing from Outer Space. If you want to see a movie of this kind, and one that is actually very intelligent, well-scripted, and beautifully made, see Carpenter's film and avoid this picture. That is, unless you want to hear, Cage talking about how his wife's breast cancer has, somehow, made her more attractive to him, a nasty subplot in the film, and, then, later deliver these immortal lines: "It's the cancer smell, Like when my father died. The cancer ward. The rotting milk smell. (addressing this to his wife) But you would know this better than anyone." Repeatedly, Cage says: "Don't worry. Everything will be okay." And also a variation on what Trump has said about the coronavirus: 'Everything's under control." Well...not really.
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