Mister Minutes' Cinema Circus

Originally published on January 13, 2021.

H.P. Lovecraft's horror story The Color Out of Space is about a completely formless, totally indescribable color that infects and destroys a Massachusetts woodland. Richard Stanley's Color Out of Space is about tentacles of purple-pink light that make Nicolas Cage act like an idiot. The original story gave me nightmares after I read it; the movie made me wish I'd been asleep instead. It's a concept that is inherently impossible to film. There's no way to effectively translate the concept of a color as an antagonistic force into the cinematic medium. The reason the short story is so scary is that it relies on your mind to do the heavy lifting, it relies on your fear to imagine what the fuck an alien color looks like before it kills you.

I know it's hard to adapt a 34 page story into an hour and a half movie, and screenwriters must add things to fill out a plot, usually with new characters and sideplots, or more deeply examining the existing elements. Color Out of Space achieves this by giving us six main characters, all of whom are horribly dull and uninteresting, as well as the stupidest people on planet Earth. With horror movies, the suspension of disbelief comes with an acceptance of a certain amount of Horror Movie Logic: the characters are going to do some things that are dumb in order to keep them in danger and keep the plot moving. Sure, you just gotta live with that in horror, but the Gardner family apparently shares a single brain cell, which collectively makes them barely as smart as the family dog. All four of the grown Gardner members blatantly ignore the weird purple flowers and mushrooms growing on their farm, but not in a purposeful way, as if it's a feature of the script; they just ignore the scary purple shit and ignore how the dad is talking like Tom DeLonge's singing. At one point, the mother and youngest son have been horrifically fused into one writhing, gelatinous, pustule-covered monstrosity that can only gurgle and scream at its ungodly existence, leaking fluids and steaming in the sunlight, and daughter Lavinia asks, without a hint of irony, "Do you want me to get you some water?"

Yeah, idiot, your mother who's currently assimilating your brother back into her body wants a crisp glass of ice water. That'll help.

The script also uses "It's gonna be okay" as a crutch for any time the writers couldn't think of anything intelligent or worthwhile to say. If I'd taken a drink for every time someone told another character "Don't worry" or "it's gonna be okay", I could have passed out and forgotten this movie existed. It doesn't help that the characters just follow no form of logical thought whatsoever. One of the main characters, Ward, is a hydrologist. He studies the movement and distribution of natural water sources. Nate Gardner, father extraordinaire, asks him to study the meteorite that crashed on his farm, which Ward pretends to do because he's not a fucking geologist. Later, the sheriff tells Ward to take a look at some weird shit they found out by the Gardner farm. He lifts up a tarp to reveal a mass of animals that have been fused together; their skin is gone, muscles and fat exposed, eyes bulging out, teeth poking out at odd angles. Ward the Scientist ways "Those look like radiation burns." They look absolutely nothing like radiation burns. They look like animals that have been turned inside out. Some zoologist you are.

Aside from being dumb as posts, the Gardners just aren't interesting characters that we want to follow. The only interesting one is Lavinia, who we're introduced to as she's performing Wiccan rituals in the woods for Selfish Teenager Goals, like being able to leave her family's middle-of-nowhere farm. Maybe I'm just biased because I like witchy goth shit, but she's the only family member who has character traits that are acted upon in the film. Her brother Benny is a lazy teen who smokes weed (apparently with a "hippy-dippy" friend who's never seen in the film) and looks at NASA data in his room. This interest in space is never utilized in any way, it plays no significance to the plot whatsoever. Maybe he could have seen the meteorite coming in a telescope, or brought some of the rock into the house to study it. But nope, the only thing he does in the movie is tend to alpacas and die in a well.

The mother, Theresa, is a stock broker or something who spends so much time working that she doesn't have much time for her family anymore, but even that's giving the writing too much credit. Her work, and her work obsession, are mentioned only in passing, with no focus on how it affects her or he family. There could have been some tension between her and Nate perhaps, or between her and her kids - some kind of tension that might be amplified by the bad vibes of the meteorite or something. Nope; she and Nate are very much in love, with the only tension being that they haven't had sex in six months after an unspecified "operation" she had, that has no significance whatsoever at any moment to the plot of the film. For real, these writers wouldn't know a Chekov's gun if they got shot in the head with one.

And then there's Nate. For real, can we please finally stop putting Nicolas Cage in movies? I like National Treasure, I like Raising Arizona, I even like Face/Off. But can we please just admit that the meme is over, and Nick Cage isn't funny? He's tedious and boring, and all his "freakout" performances people love to make fun of look the same. He uses the same weird surfer voice and puts his hands in people's faces and just makes an ass of himself for no good reason. I know he still has to pay off the stolen Mongolian dinosaur bones or whatever, but have some dignity, Nick. There's nothing special in his performance, nothing we haven't seen before. He's boring.

Going back to Lavinia, she again is the only character who has a semblance of a personality and acts upon it. When things are ramping up and getting crazy, she conducts a ritual from the Necronomicon in her room to protect herself from whatever's happening. It's not a seemingly smart move in the context, even though she cuts runes into her body using a box knife. The stupid part is that the script doesn't go into the effects or implications of such a ritual at all. First off, if I may tangent for a second, why does she have a copy of the Necronomicon that she clearly bought at a Barnes & Noble or something? Why would an insanely dangerous magical tome that can drive the reader mad be put into mass production and sale? Why is this just a totally normal thing in this world that a 16 year old can just go get? Anyway, that aside, her father and brother act surprised at her bloodied appearance for literally one second before forgetting and returning their attention to the other shit going on. I know weird shit's happening, Nate, but I'd still be a little concerned if my daughter came downstairs with a shitty pentagram carved into her clavicle.

The other part of this that bugs me is that the movie makes an effort to portray Lavinia as being into the occult (a major facet of Lovecraft writings!) and makes no effort to examine any consequences to her actions, good or bad. The very first scene is her performing a ritual to "get out of here"; that night, the meteor hits their farm. Is there a connection? Did the Old Ones monkey's paw her ritual and send the meteorite to kill them all? Never explored. Later, she performs the Necronomicon protection ritual but still gets vaporized by the color at the end. Did that ritual backfire and lead to her death, or does it just not work? You could say I'm reading too much into this, but if you're going to include witchcraft and magic rituals in a mythos that regularly examines what happens when ordinary people mess with otherworldly forces, and then show those rituals not work, it says something about those rituals. If the Wiccan ritual backfired and brought the meteorite down as a form of magical irony, you could spin that as the eldritch powers saying "fuck you"; that would have been an interesting thing to incorporate into this story. But, if the Necronomicon protection ritual doesn't work and she still dies, that kind of means the Necronomicon - made up by Lovecraft but very real within his stories - is total bullshit.

But!! Believe it or not, despite all that, I do have something positive to say about this movie! The production design and CGI artists deserve a medal for trying their best to make interesting visuals to counteract the shitty script. They do a genuinely good job portraying the slow, incremental spread of the color: a tint in the water, purple layers in ice cubes, pink blood - subtle touches that are actually pretty effective. The creature effects are also pretty good, especially when Theresa and Jack have fully fused into a horrific spider-legged monster that attacks Lavinia. "Attacks" is a generous term though - the monster just kind of stands over her and drools on her without doing anything truly threatening. Another missed opportunity in writing and direction. The creature is shown mostly in shadow, but not in a scary way, and it doesn't do anything to really threaten Lavinia. They could have seriously bumped up the horror and sadness of the situation by having Theresa, still barely clinging to consciousness, recognize her daughter, maybe approach and try to embrace her; show me the human trapped within the body horror, or go all-out and show me that Theresa is gone and all that's left is a monster that wants to kill. Instead, they go right down the middle with some ineffectual head-swaying and heavy breathing.

So, all in all, this is a disappointing Lovecraft adaptation, but it was kind of doomed to begin with. Nicolas Cage, a bad script, and a director who hasn't made a real movie since being fired from his last picture in 1996 do not make for a good film. If you want some actual good Lovecraftian horror, watch The Void, a truly terrifying film that has nothing to do with Lovecraft's work but handles the existential horror infinitely better than Color Out of Space.

Last thing, promise... why drop "The"? Don't be a coward, call it THE Color Out of Space.