Color Out of Space (2019)

It’s been a while since we’ve written anything Lovecraft-related, so we’ve decided to compensate for it by reviewing Richard Stanley’s 2019 adaptation of The Colour out of Space. Warning: SPOILERS.

Ward Phillips is a hydrologist sent to the lands surrounding Arkham to do a survey. There he meets Lavinia Gardner and her family – her father, alpaca-enthusiast Nathan; her recovering mother, Theresa; her stoner brother, Benny; and her kid brother, Jack. They live in an isolated farm and after a meteorite falls near their home, a strange colour begins to infect everything around it, ruining crops and mutating the wildlife. Soon the Gardners begin to change, both mentally and physically. However, by the time they think of leaving, they realise that the mysterious colour has a mind of its own and they’re trapped.

The biggest problem with adapting this story is the fact that much of the goings-on at the Gardner farm happen off-page. Whenever their neighbour goes there, he only witnesses the end results and hears Nahum’s unreliable account of what’s been happening. Ward’s presence and his connection to Lavinia could be a way to let the audience see the changes progressing. Unfortunately, the movie never does that, and he probably witnesses as much as the neighbour does in the original. Instead, Lavinia serves as our guide in the Gardner household. She senses herself being affected by something, wants to leave, but is prevented from doing so by something she doesn’t understand. Seeing someone losing their mind and unable to save themselves should’ve been scary and disturbing. However, the movie is incapable of building up suspense. It doesn’t help that her father, Nathan Gardner, is played by Nicholas Cage, who pretty much acts like a loon from the start. It’s actually difficult to know when exactly the alien colour starts to affect him.

(Cage’s deranged performance, which includes milking an alpaca, reminded us of that episode of Community where Abed nearly went crazy trying to decide whether Cage was a good or bad actor. After watching Color Out of Space, we believe we have an answer to that question: he’s a bad actor. On the other hand, we don’t know what Stanley’s directions were, so maybe he was doing exactly what he was told to do, which would make him a good actor despite the fact that his performance was crap. Holy shit, this is nuts!)

The original story may have some showy moments, but the horror there is of the creeping kind, coming from the slow physical and mental decay of the Gardner family as the mysterious, indescribable colour that arrived in a meteorite sucks the life out of everything it touches, leaving it grey and brittle. Color Out of Space (2019) latches onto those showy moments and keeps adding more, turning the story into an OTT mess. The sequence that ends with Theresa and Jack fused together, comes across as ridiculous. It starts with the Gardners finding out Nathan’s alpacas got turned into a hairless, four-headed creature and ends with mother and son being hit with a burst of alien light. The way it’s shot, it looks like the mutant alpacas hit them with laser beams. Also, why is the colour fusing animals and people together? And why is it a lot nicer than Lovecraft’s? The original was an alien life vampire that fed until it was strong enough to leave, this one is some glowing purple-pink tentacled blob that goes around creating weirdness for no apparent reason. It doesn’t even directly kill anyone apart from Ezra and the sheriff. In the end, it doesn’t return to space, it opens some interdimensional wormhole into a place filled with tentacles and Lavinia lets herself be sucked into it, which is what creates the “blasted heath”.

Some characters’ actions make no sense, even taking into account the alien influence. Why does Nathan try to feed his daughter to his mutated wife? Why does Lavinia suddenly change her mind about leaving and then welcomes the wormhole?

In addition to everything we already mentioned, there’s the fact that the movie uses the introduction from the original story in the beginning, which mentions the woods hiding ancient secrets and the warnings given in Arkham about the area. There is, of course, one major issue with using that opening: the nameless hydrologist is sent to do a survey decades after the events that took place at the Gardners’ farm. The people of Arkham warn him about the place because of that. In fact, Lovecraft makes a point of mentioning that there were no other legends associated with the place. On the other hand, in this movie, Ward arrives before the meteorite falls and witnesses the “strange days” the original narrator only hears about second-hand from the Gardners’ neighbour. Also, it makes no sense to talk about ancient secrets when the meteorite wasn’t that long ago. The nameless hydrologist is even surprised to find out just how recent the events are.

This movie feels less like an adaptation (even if a bad one) of Lovecraft, and more like a mockery of his work. Not a parody, something even Lovecraft himself engaged in with The Unnamable, but a mockery made by people who look down on it (which is weird because both Stanley and Cage claim to be fans). How else to explain Nathan, the alpaca-enthusiast, Ezra’s death randomly mimicking The Whisperer in Darkness, or Lavinia doing magical rituals based on a pocketbook copy of the Necronomicon? Lavinia’s existence also links this crap to The Dunwich Horror because, let’s face it, there’s no way this name choice was a coincidence, even if her personality is quite different from Lavinia Whateley’s. In fact, Richard Stanley is planning to make a Lovecraftian trilogy, the next victim being, you guessed it, The Dunwich Horror. By the way, we read an interview Stanley gave to The Guardian in 2020 and his idea for The Dunwich Horror involves "backward MAGA-era hillbillies who have interbred with ultra-dimensional demons from beyond space". Because connecting Lovecraftian monsters and racism is oh, so original. Poor Yog Sothoth. But wait, why didn’t he just adapt that one first? You get body horror, weird rituals, tentacled beings from another dimension bursting into ours… It would’ve made more sense to adapt that than to turn The Colour out of Space into a bad acid trip.

The weirdest part about this crap movie is the fact that several professional reviewers have praised it, not just as a movie, but as an adaptation of the source material. Seriously?! What about this was a good adaptation? It’s like they don’t care because Lovecraft wrote about tentacled eldritch alien creatures and cosmic horror using purple prose (which is actually part of the fun with his stories), so people have permission to mangle his work. Oh, wait, but Stanley didn’t mangle The Colour out of Space – according to some of these professional reviewers, he was in fact pretty faithful to Lovecraft’s work. Have any of them read the original short story or just a blurb? It’s one thing to argue that it’s a good movie, but a good adaptation?! No way.

As for whether Color Out of Space (2019) is a good movie… While it has some gory moments, it’s not really scary. It's not that funny either. Stanley calls it a black comedy, but the only thing that might be classified as humour comes from Cage's performance, which is terrible. And the visuals aren’t particularly appealing. They should’ve spent less on creating pretty colours and more on the CGI for Theresa’s final monster mutation. The other dimension isn’t that impressive either. If we weren’t so annoyed by the Lovecraft connection, we might’ve been able to laugh at its general awfulness. Really, this is not a good movie. It’s also nearly two hours long.