'Color Out Of Space' A Review

Color Out Of Space is a science fiction/horror movie based on the HP Lovecraft story of the same name about a family having recently moved to a rural farm after living in the big city being interrupted by a strange meteorite. The movie opens on Lavina(Madeleine Arthur) performing a heathen ritual in order to keep her mother's cancer away, it's interrupted by Ward(Elliot Knight) a hydrologist surveyor and the two kind of flirt. We meet Lavina's mother Theresa(Joely Richardson) and father Nathan(Nicolas Cage) and her two brothers. What appears to be a quiet family drama quickly diverts into psychedelic horror with the semi-formless alien that hitches a ride on the meteor that crashes in the family's front yard.

Cage is allowed a few sparring moments of energetic eccentricity but for the most part the half-baked mostly lifeless script prevent him or really any of the cast from doing anything particularly exciting. It's always a pleasure to see Richardson but aside from a particularly bizarre sequence- when she is subsuming her youngest son into her back and transforming into some monstrosity bleating and screeching for no joke five minutes straight- the role doesn't offer her much to do. The younger cast are servicable but clearly out of their depth with the tone and the thinness of the story.

Perhaps this is a successful adaption of Lovecraft but his stories are not known for their characters, plot, or lucidity but mood and ideas. As such once the magenta lights start flaring and alien flowers and bugs start sprouting it may be "faithful" to the source material but a good movie it does not make. It makes too little sense, the characters are too wooden, the stakes are so vague there virtually are none. Part of the necessity of genre is worldbuilding, is that magic or aliens or time travel or future tech or whatever have some kind of internal logic, they may not be "possible" but they make sense within the rules and ideas set up within the story. After the half way mark the movie turns into something more akin to a Pink Floyd laser light show than an actual narrative and that's a problem.

At best a future cult classic for a supremely select few.

Don't See It.