The problem with Lovecraft adaptations is the same with those of Poe: there's always more going on in the observer's nervous system than there is action in front of them. So, you'd think that the imaginative possibilities of cinema would bring great life to them. But there are so few exceptions (Roger Corman's Poe movies, Some of Stuart Gordon's tries) and the greatest Lovecraftian film I've seen makes no pretense of being from his works: Brian Yuzna's Society. So, when I heard that Richard Stanley, director of the formidable robot slasher Hardware was at the helm of The Color out of Space I thought, I'll give that a go. And so I did.
In fact I gave it two. The first was after an online screening party and I broke my rule of never seeing anything new while tanked. The film began well but started plodding into stodginess and I bailed. My viewing partner was far more tolerant and probably not as intoxicated. That was on my mind the next day and, as the rental window was still in effect, I watched it with coffee and vegemite toast.
The Gardners live in the country and farm alpacas. They're not a perfect family but not dysfunctional either. The daughter, Lavinia, is a wiccan and she's the first character we see, performing a ritual to cure her mother's cancer and for herself to get out of a life she considers dull. She's interrupted by the surveyor from the story and their dialogue establishes that changes are afoot in the land as it is to be developed.
Back home, Dad's cooking is not as good as Mum's but they dig in as Mum finishes a corporate Zoom meeting. All at the table and being familial when there is a mighty crash outside. They rush out and find a glowing purple ... ish meteorite in a crater. In the days to come they and the whole area are affected by the influence of this bizarre new thing and everything goes wrong.
That's the Lovecraft story and you get a good chunk of it on screen. Decent performances all round and Nicolas Cage is mostly restrained. When he gets cast it's usually a package deal whereby he's a good guy whose about to get a lot of hits to his life when he pushes back explosively. It's a fair deal and Richard Stanley is aware of it. The problem is that his restraint is pushed so far back that he's not as appealingly normal as ... boring. His daughter is getting witchy with the forest, his son is making his own investigations, his youngest seems drawn to the thing in the well and his wife is doing her best to combat the effects of her illness and the disturbing influence of the new force in town and he is dull about it all. Not just dull in a scene or two but repeatedly so uninteresting that what might have been his gravitas feels more like a bipedal black hole. And then later when he gets toward the iginition he's paid for it's kind of ok.
And Richard Stanley, who dazzled me once in an interview when he reeled off a massive list of what the robot in a Hardware sequel might be capable of, can do little more with the elements of a Lovecraft story and stir them around and around and around until it looks like one big bowl of very pretty porridge. Lovecraft's story is about a community facing disaster and the heartbreaking effects of that upon the collective psyche. Stanley gives us a sluggish carousel that doesn't develop until it has to by which time it feels like a movie at least half an hour longer than it should be. This, despite the amount of action crammed into the final twenty minutes. None of it feels earned.
In a sense very little of it is earned. The nasty chopping board moment is out of Sion Sono's Suicide Circle and the fused body monsters are from John Carpenter's The Thing. I wouldn't care about either of those lifts if anything interesting had been done with them but they just kind of happen and get shelved before what might have had an impact at the time comes after a delay. This tale has neither momentum to drive it nor a brood to observe.
And that was without a drink.
The Color Out of Space can be rented from itunes/Apple Movies
A quiet film about a quiet novitiate nun might not spell party time but Ida's tale of a young Polish woman's confrontation with the past is compelling. 1962. Anna, on the verge of taking holy orders, must contact her only living relative as a means of completing her farewell to the secular world. Her aunt Wanda tells her that her real name is Ida which revelation is followed by a string of others that leaves Anna/Ida needing to reset her identity. Like everyone else her story emerged from the recent world war with scars which she only now can see. Wanda, defiantly bohemian, invites her niece into the pleasures and conflicts of life outside. Ida has some decisions to make.
