Movie Review: Color Out Of Space

Well, there's no "U" in "Color" so I guess it sucks.

Actually, it doesn't. Color Out of Space is a sincere and competent attempt to film a completely unfilmable story. As a horror movie, it succeeds at its most basic task: scaring the audience. My wife spent about half the run time in the theater vestibule, peeking in when she thought it would be safe and pulling back when it got too scary.

I say "unfilmable" story, because of course the source material, the short story "The Colour Out of Space" (note the U!) is about a meteor which brings an indescribable color to a New England farm in the late 19th century. Over the next year or two the inhabitants of the farm are driven mad and physically debilitated by the mysterious color, which poisons the entire surrounding area. 

In the real world, a color film can't be about a color which doesn't exist, so they made it magenta. Ah, well.

To pump up the thrill factor the moviemakers made some choices which made for more immediate scariness but had the overall effect of weakening the story, in my opinion. They added psychological elements, including a mild case of what looks like ghost possession, which felt very out-of-place. They tossed in a generous dose of Cronenbergian body horror. And there were a lot of plot threads and themes which were introduced and then abandoned — one character seems to be recovering from cancer, which is mentioned several times, but that more or less gets lost in the more immediate issue of an alien presence draining the life out of everyone. There's a little contrived isolation for plot purposes — the cars won't start but nobody thinks of walking out until it's night, and then they're too scared.

But there are chunks of dialog and narration straight out of the story, and everything comes to a proper Lovecraftian conclusion. Lots of fun shout-outs to HPL's greater "mythos" of towns and family names.

The acting is all good and believable. Nicholas Cage hams it up, but he kind of has to. The rest of the cast are good, even when they're assigned more or less stock character roles. ("You're the little girl from Poltergeist, only you're a boy. Got it?")

I give this movie a solid B. It does exactly what it attempts. Lovecraft fans should see it.

 

For a story about otherworldly presences and invisible horrors, check out my new novel The Initiate, in stores next week!

Comments

[Chuk]

"a color film can't be about a color which doesn't exist"
Spoiler!