Nicolas Cage has graced us with his presence at Midnight Madness for 3 of the last 4 years. Does this mean that he is an MM regular now? I, for one, am very excited about this.
This year, his return coincides with the long-awaited re-emergence of director Richard Stanley, another cinematic madman who hasn’t been seen on a feature movie set since he was undercover playing a dog-man on The Island of Dr. Moreau. It really is a match made in heaven.
Unfortunately, Color Out of Space isn’t fully the wild beast that it should be. There are a lot of things I like about it – I like Cage, I like alpacas (he runs an alpaca farm), and I like the Lovecraftian idea of an object from another realm changing the properties of our world and driving us mad, as it happens to the Gardner family in this story.
But the movie goes from 0 to 100 before we get much semblance of who anybody is, sapping their eventual horrifying transitions of any sort of real disturbance. Stanley then proceeds to slam together tense and violent scenes with little flow or atmosphere, while the soundtrack just continues to get louder. Lovecraft’s subtly unnerving terror is nowhere to be found.
Cage is conventionally over-the-top but he still finds some weird interactions and bizarre line readings here and there that make you long for the film to be a bit more offbeat.
Basically, it needs some of that trusty Wicker Man spirit.
- Release Date: 9/7/2019
