What the hell was that? Well, that is a much needed responses when you watch a movie based on an H.P. Lovecraft story. It took some convincing to make me watch this movie. The last time I watched a horror movie with Nicolas Cage was Mandy which I couldn't actually finish watching because it was so bad and unwatchable in my opinion. This movie, luckily, does not suffer the same fatal flaws. Like let's get down to it.
Color out of Space is based on a short story with the same name by H.P. Lovecraft and the script was written by Scarlett Amaris who previously wrote a few unknown horror movies. It is directed by Richard Stanley who has a lot of known and unknown horror movies under his belt and has already tried to adapt Lovecraft stories before. This is a cosmic horror fun weird B level movie.
The story follows the Gardner (I think pun intended in this case) family of five who just moved to a farm (in a Lovecraftian town in Massachusetts) after the mother recovers from breast cancer surgery. Nathan is the father of the family (played by Nicolas Cage), the mother is Theresa (played by Joely Richardson, forever Anita from 101 Dalmatians), Benny is their oldest son (played by Brendan Meyer), Lavinia is their daughter who practices Wicca (played by Madeleine Arthur) to try and heal her mother and Jack is just a child (played by Julian Hilliard). Tommy Chong (Leo from That '70s Show) is also in this movie, playing the same character as Leo. Elliot Knight plays Ward the hydrologist who surveys the water for a dam that is to be built in the area.
The Gardner family try and have a normal life in their new farm life. Which is totally not normal. They have Alpacas on their farm instead of cows for crying out loud, that is hilarious in my opinion. One night a meteor lands on their land. A purple meteor. Time for a Lovecraft stuff to start. Plus this movie has a lot of Lovecraft Easter Eggs. Now, no one seems too concerned about this meteor and only the local media covers the crash. Then suddenly the meteor disappears and things start to get strange. Purple stuff start to grow around the landing site, only it is a color that no one has a name for. Internet starts to not work occasionally and TV reception becomes bad and you know. Lovecraft horror stuff starts. The only sane person is Ward who simply tries to do his job when all of this hell starts to break loss. And he is the one that notices that something is very wrong.
As for the acting, everyone is doing a decent job here. Elliot Knight is good as the calm and sensible person, while everyone is doing their best to be totally over the top. Except for Nicolas Cage, he is relatively subdued here. Because his over the top is so much more than anyone else's. The acting isn't superb, but everyone are ok in this movie.
The movie is beautiful in all its eldritch horror. However, this movie came out in 20 September, 2019 and production started early in 2019, and this movie's esthetics really really reminded me of Annihilation (2018). There are so many time in this movie that I thought that the visuals are really similar even though the concept is not. If you liked how Annihilation looked, you will like this movie. Although don't forget that these movies are totally different so there is nothing similar about their ending.
Even though the similarities to Annihilation bugged me. It was a fun and really strange, kind of disturbing horror movie. I liked it more than I thought that I will. In the never ending spare time ahead of us, you could totally check out this movie. If you love H.P. Lovecraft you should totally watch this movie. It's one of the best adaptation of his work (I don't include TV shows when I say this).
The movie is now available to rent or buy on Amazon Prime.
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