Back in January, I wrote about the film Hardware, which in 1990 had become enough of a cult hit to make Hollywood interested in working with director Richard Stanley. This ultimately led to the debacle that was 1996’s The Island of Dr. Moreau (featuring Marlon Brando in white makeup wearing an ice bucket on his head), an experience so unpleasant for Stanley (before he was replaced as director by John Frankenheimer) that he ended up abandoning the mainstream film industry for decades. That story, and whole lot more, was told in the 2014 documentary Lost Soul, which you should definitely watch, and may possibly still be on Tubi as you read this. This past year saw his return to directing a non-short/documentary film, and it just so happens to be a very Creature Canon Compatible® one at that, so for the first time in a while we’re going to be taking a look at contemporary material (and the next visit to modern times may be sooner than you think!), as well as our first foray into the career of a master of weird, mind-bending fiction that makes you question the nature of reality: Nicolas Cage. Also Lovecraft, I guess.
Very few writers have had the impact that H(ighly) P(roblematic) Lovecraft has on the horror genre, and “The Color Out of Space” from 1927 is one of his most famous stories, showcasing the cosmic horror themes that runs through his work, where the universe is openly hostile and full of incomprehensible entities whose very existence warps the world around them. It’s also one of the more palatable of his stories today, being (I think?) among his least openly, viciously racist. It’s been adapted into film before—specifically in the superlatively titled 1965 Boris Karloff thriller Die, Monster, Die!—but Stanley’s version seems to be the first real attempt to adapt it and retain its disturbing qualities, while also setting it in the modern day. Even so, this movie often feels like a throwback—not just to Lovecraft (you’ll get some more florid-sounding narration that seems pulled right from the original text), but also to eighties horror movies, where the slightly ridiculous and nausea-inducing often commingled, and sometimes even to the historical crazy performances of its star. Did I mention that Nicolas Cage is in this, and that he is going 100% Nicolas Cage? I think it’s an important thing to note.
The plot centres on the Gardner family—parents Nathan (Cage) and Theresa (Joely Richardson), goth daughter Lavinia, space-and-marijuana enthusiast son Benny, and youngest son Jack (who evidently likes dinosaurs)—living out in the sticks of Massachusetts, raising alpacas while Theresa also obsessively plays at the stock market. Things get weird when a hot pink meteorite crashes in their front yard, and while the parents and local authorities try to play it off like No Big Deal (although Nathan is made a fool by a local sensationalist reporter), others notice the landscape begin to change—not just the kids, but also shack hermit Ezra (Tommy Chong, in a role that in an earlier time would have just went to a “Tommy Chong type”) and Ward, a surveyor who is studying the area as part of a dam project being pushed by the local town of Arkham’s self-absorbed mayor (a plot element that drops in and out.) Rays of extraterrestrial hot pink begin to flow from the ground, making the vegetables taste funny, changing animals into either colourful mutants (like a single praying mantis that reappears throughout the movie) or flayed, melting monstrosities, and making the entire family except Lavinia and Benny act strange, with Jack beginning to talk to their well. Needless to say, that colour from out of space is making things a little topsy-turvy.
The thing is, even though things are supposed to get odd when the space rock shows up, the transition in the Gardner family from “normal” to “alien mutant” is fairly gradual and subtle, which is to say that Nicolas Cage plays a weirdo throughout, and only gets more so when the Sci-Fi elements come in. None of the characters in this are especially realistic, and are fairly reliant on their primary characteristic—Lavinia is the angry teen girl into dark magic stuff (she owns a copy of the Necronomicon, which in this universe is apparently available in paperback), Theresa is work-obsessed, etc.—while there seems to be some unspoken sources of tension in the family that is only alluded to passingly, such as Theresa’s recent mastectomy and Nathan’s simmering hatred of his dead father. Things are seemingly not very happy in the Gardner family already, and the changes in their behaviour after the colour appears (and infects them through the alien-tainted water supply) only exacerbates the situation, with the parents and Jack’s increased aloofness (which leads to Theresa accidentally cutting off some of her fingers) being the main indicators. On the other hand, Nathan seems to be just as able to yell about alpacas and vegetables before the alien influence comes in as after. I do think the choice of how Nathan reacts to the situations as they escalate demonstrate a certain pathetic machismo—he’s trying very hard to look like he’s in control of the situation, but is constantly undermined by his own decisions, and eventually seems to just slunk down into blissful, TV-watching ignorance rather than admitting that anything is wrong. Lovecraft is all about the terrors of the universe driving people mad, which both the screenplay and Cage pick up on—but also add the idea that the guy wasn’t entirely there to begin with. This seems to come from not just Cage’s desire to play a Nicolas Cage character (he even seems to dip into his Vampire’s Kiss mannerisms during some of his rants), but also continues Richard Stanley’s approach to characters—these people aren’t as cartoonish as they were in Hardware (I’d hope he’d make some alterations to his method after thirty years), but they aren’t real people either, they’re stylized types.
In this case, though, I think it’s fine. It heightens the overall bizarre tone, and does nothing to lessen the impact when the horror elements are introduced. To be honest, I think living in an already weird situation only makes the weirder situation that imposes itself on them even scarier. I guess it also helps that at least you have the entirely “normal” Ward (who wears a Miskatonic University shirt, but there are unfortunately no direct references to Herbert West, Re-Animator) popping in and out of the situation and reacting to both the Gardners and the growing alien menace with an equal amount of concern.
The horror stuff, when it arrives in full force, pushes into the utterly grotesque early and effectively. Some CGI aside, it mostly pulls off some classically gross practical effects, which immediately call to mind those aforementioned eighties horror movies—there is definitely some inspiration taken from John Carpenter’s The Thing, especially when Nathan is forced to shotgun his valuable alpacas after they’ve been fused into a multi-headed meat blob, and Evil Dead, when Theresa and Jack (flesh-fused by the space colour) suddenly become very spidery and Deadite-esque. That latter part is a bit silly, especially after several scenes where their mutation is played as sad and disturbing body horror to the extreme (and gives Cage more opportunities to act emotionally volatile), but after spending much of the movie waiting for a mutant alpaca monster to show up (and getting exactly what I asked for a more!), who am I to judge? The landscape also alters over time (as Ezra theorizes, the entity is trying to make their world more like its own), and the way Stanley creates the increasingly alien look of the woods leads to the movie’s most arresting visuals, and the moments when the concept of a living colour is really used to distressingly beautiful effect—I’m reminded that Stanley is a very interesting director of visuals, even without the very-of-the-moment music video editing tricks that filled Hardware.
The tone is a little bit wonky, never committing entirely to the awe and psychological horror, or to an intentionally over-the-top style similar to the late Stuart Gordon’s Lovecraft adaptations like From Beyond, but again, I think it benefits from just muddling together a completely off-kilter atmosphere. It’s inconsistent, yes, but what business does a movie about a space colour from the Worm Planet have with consistency? The whole point is that something we can’t understand has come down and is altering our surroundings in ways both small (vegetables tasting bad, yelling about vegetables tasting bad) and large (the woods becoming a razzmatazz watercolour full of angry meat monsters and killer trees), upending everything we know and corrupting it down to the minutest detail (specifically the water supply, a basic unit of the natural world.) The change is swift, it doesn’t really make sense to us, and we have to live with it because escape is impossible—that’s always been the idea of cosmic horror, and it’s the idea that Stanley fully embraces in this.
A Scrapbook of Infinite Noise 