Movie Review: Color Out of Space (2020)
The Colour Out of Space was the original title of this work from the late 1800s – early 1900s legendary horror author H.P. Lovecraft. It was a short story originally published in Amazing Stories in 1927. The short story is only about 30 pages but had a lot of visuals, tension, and atmosphere as Lovecraft was brilliant when it came to descriptive writing. He’s most famously known for being the mastermind behind two things that have been common in horror for decades – The Necronomicon, and Cthulhu. Lovecraft built an entire universe filled with elder gods, creatures beneath the sea, and everything in between and is pretty much the godfather of what we refer to today as “Cosmic Horror”. The original short story was a perfect example of this genre, and this film is a fantastic modern adaptation of that story.
Written and directed by Richard Stanley, with help in the writing department from Scarlett Amaris, Color Out of Space is about a family that moves to a remote wooded location and a meteorite lands in their front yard, which causes a lot of strange occurrences. There are many things to like about this film and surprisingly few gripes. Being a Lovecraft adaptation, you never really know what you are going to get. One thing we will say is that the budget here was good. The family is played by Nicolas Cage as Nathan Gardner, along with Joely Richardson (Event Horizon, Maggie) as his wife Theresa, and Madeleine Arthur, Brendan Meyer, and Julian Hilliard as their children Lavinia, Benny, and Jack. Elliot Knight plays the water surveyor Ward, and even Tommy Chong is in this film as a hippie named Ezra. All of the acting in this was top-notch. There were a few moments where Cage was obviously Cage, but that was fitting in this scenario and welcomed.
Another thing to note about this film was the overall production. Everything was about as good as it can possibly get for an independent film. The cinematography was exactly what it needed to be. There were a lot of notable shots mixed throughout the film. The sound department was doing a good job of keeping the atmosphere right in the pocket along with the camera work, and the music was perfect as well. Going back to the special effects, though, there were a lot of good practical and CGI effects. And the CGI was done extremely well. It was not detracting from the film like noticeable CGI normally would, and the practical effects were also on-point. And the actual colors. The colors were perfect. They were prominent and brilliant when they should have been, and a bit more on the drab side when it was called for.
The writing in Color Out of Space was pretty solid. There were a lot of things that were kept in and referenced that were pulled right out of the original Lovecraft work and were definitely appreciated. They also even threw in some nods to other places in the Lovecraft universe, which was very cool to see on screen. Bringing a story from 1927 to a modern-day adaptation with cellphones, computers and today’s technology must have been a bit challenging, but they pulled it off while still paying a lot of respect to the original work in the process.
Overall, we were blown away by how good this was. We were expecting it to be pretty good given the information we had, but it exceeded our expectations in almost every way. We feel like this was a respectable adaptation of a classic Lovecraft story that had just about everything you could ask for. As far as Cosmic Horror goes, this ranks up there with the absolute best we have seen.
Definitely watch Color Out of Space as soon as it releases on January 24th. Check out the trailer below, and let us know what you think!
