Un-Caged in Space
Color Out of Space (R16, 110 mins) Directed by Richard Stanley Reviewed by James Croot ★★★1⁄2
Nathan Gardner (Nicolas Cage) is living the dream. With his wife and three children, he’s swapped the big city for his father’s rural farm in Arkham, Massachusetts. He’s cultivated a wine cellar, is experimenting in the kitchen, and has bought himself a herd of ‘‘the animal of the future’’, alpacas.
Everything changes after the night of the sonic boom, flash of light and the meteorite. At first, it’s just their youngest Jack (Julian Hilliard) who seems spooked. But, after the space rock disappears and is replaced by strange flowers, matriarch Theresa (Joely Richardson) inexplicably chops off the tips of two of her fingers instead of the dinner’s carrots.
That’s also when they discover that their phone signal is getting scrambled and their electronics are going awry. That’s just the start of the very visceral horrors that unfold during the course of Color Out of Space.
Absent from feature filmmaking since being fired from a 1996 adaptation of The Island of Dr Moreau , director and co-writer Richard Stanley here reminds us of the skills that made his earlier works like Hardware and Dust Devil cult hits (he even includes a cheeky nod to Moreau, by featuring its wayward star Marlon Brando on a TV screen).
Space is filled to the brim with inventive camera angles, wild visuals and clever use of sound and focus. Previously transformed into 1965’s Die, Monster, Die! and 1987 Wil Wheaton-starrer The Curse,
H P Lovecraft’s nightmarish tale this time plays out as a kind of
Close Encounters of the Third Kindmeets-Poltergeist with a side order of John Carpenter’s The Thing and a soupcon of David Cronenberg’s
The Fly. It definitely doesn’t reach the heights of any of those classics though, preferring shock value over anything remotely like a coherent plot.
Of course, its true drawcard is Cage. Fresh from his latest career comeback in 2018’s Mandy, here we once again get a performance of two halves. They’re perhaps not as extreme as in Panos Cosmatos’ phantasmagoric horror, but it’s still a lot of fun to see nebbish Nic slip into a full-on Cage rage at the drop of a hat.