Color Out of Space review: Nic Cage + Lovecraft = Match made in R‘lyeh

A glowing purple meteorite makes life, uh, difficult and gross for an isolated farm family after it crashes in their yard in the new film Color Out of Space. Because the family's patriarch is played by human-TNT hybrid Nicolas Cage and the director is Richard Stanley-who hasn't made a narrative feature since 1996's The Island of Doctor Moreau went so ass-over-teakettle that a whole documentary is devoted to its disaster-ness-you might not expect Color to be an exercise in subtlety. It is not a movie encumbered by "good taste" and does not feel like it was ever brought up in a boardroom full of suits who wanted to make sure it would "play for all demographics" in "all markets."

Yet Color's first half, before everything succumbs to glorious madness while Nic Cage does what we pay him to do, is a surprisingly effective look at a family trying to keep things together.

Something nasty's in the woodshed well in the trailer for Color Out of Space.

This new film is based on the short story "The Colour Out of Space" by H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937), whose short stories often feature rural families becoming isolated, inbred, degenerate, or cannibals. Oh, or turning into fish-people. In Stanley's film, the family's isolation is more emotional than physical. Mom (Joely Richardson) is a workaholic recovering from a mastectomy. The daughter (Madeleine Arthur) dabbles in the occult. The teenage son (Brendan Meyer) smokes doobies behind the barn. And the younger son (Julian Hilliard) eventually makes friends with a disembodied voice coming out of the well. See, America, this is what happens when your town doesn't have a nearby Blockbuster.

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