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March 28, 2024, 10:47:15 AM

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Color Out Of Space (2020)

Started by Small Man Big Horse, January 18, 2020, 01:16:28 PM

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Small Man Big Horse

Richard Stanley's new film based on a much loved Lovecraft tale has now leaked, just so folk know, I'm definitely planning on watching it later so will report back once I've finished it.

Puce Moment

Nice one! Going to view it this evening as well!

Thanks!

petercussing

Cool, thanks for the heads up. HEard this ain't so great, but i'll hold any oppinion until i dun see'd it.

Small Man Big Horse

I've a lot of confused feelings about this. I mean, as a horror film it mostly works, it takes a little bit too long to get going and sometimes Cage overacts (and his voice goes a bit weird too, sounding a bit like Richard Nixon in one scene which seemed an odd decision) and there are parts which are easy to mock (he sure does fucking love Alpacas, for one thing), but the dread builds nicely in the second half and some of the body horror is really disturbing, one particular event is really quite freaky and effective, and I liked it a fair bit overall.

As a Lovecraft adaptation though I'm not sure how I feel, some of it is still great but the modernisation means there's things here that would never feature in his fiction - unless I've forgotten that a supporting character has a cat called G-Spot, for instance, and Lovecraft wasn't exactly well known for his use of "Asshat". He's rarely explicit when it comes to the horrific elements either and this definitely is, yet I'm not sure a faithful adaptation of this story would have been that good either.

Part of me wants to like it a bit more than I did just because I'm pleased that Richard Stanley's made a comeback, and the direction is pretty decent 95% of the time, not that it becomes anything that interesting until the final forty minutes but during the last part there are some fun and unusual scenes. I just wish the first half had been a bit more interesting, and that perhaps someone other than Cage (who I normally rate a lot when he's trying to act at least) had been cast in the lead role, and then it could have been all a bit special. A generous 7/10.

PlanktonSideburns


purlieu

Quote from: Small Man Big Horse on January 18, 2020, 07:46:44 PM
As a Lovecraft adaptation though I'm not sure how I feel
To be fair, this is about as positive as reactions to Lovecraft adaptations get.

How do they get around the, er, 'difficult' aspect of
Spoiler alert
the titular colour not being part of the standard visible spectrum?
[close]

Small Man Big Horse

Quote from: purlieu on January 18, 2020, 07:52:11 PM
To be fair, this is about as positive as reactions to Lovecraft adaptations get.

How do they get around the, er, 'difficult' aspect of
Spoiler alert
the titular colour not being part of the standard visible spectrum?
[close]

Poorly unfortunately,
Spoiler alert
as the colour that's never been seen before is...purple.
[close]

phantom_power

To be fair I've never seen that before


But then I am a dog


platform

this was about as good as something like the recent pet semetary film, which in a lot of ways it resembled

cage being cage might have been annoying in a better film but for me it was one of the few points of interest. Without that performance we would have had someone else on the level of the witchy goth daughter and stoner son, neither of whom could do anything with the consistently terrible dialogue

i liked seeing the alpacas

BlodwynPig


Famous Mortimer

I enjoyed it a bit more than SMBH, probably.

The colour thing. If you go with the conceit that the movie isn't trying to show us a colour we've never seen before, it's merely trying to recreate the story of Ward (who looked distractingly like a hipster Lewis Hamilton) - Cage describes it as "pink...actually, I'm not sure what colour it was". So, it's the movie trying to recreate a story that someone told about seeing a colour he couldn't properly describe.

The weird thing is, the movie actually doesn't go as full-on "dumb horror movie" as the story does. If memory serves, there's a bit at the end of the story where a chunk of the colour falls back into the well at the end, something which doesn't happen here. I was waiting for that glow to come from the reservoir as Ward is walking away, but good on them for not doing so. Also, good on them for making Lovecraft's protagonist a black guy, which the man himself would have hated.

I thought the bit with the parents not being in the house for about 15 minutes of screentime was a bit filler-y, but I thought it was largely very well shot, and I dug the adult performances too. The kids were a bit weak, but so be it. I think I prefered, overall, the 2008 "Color From The Dark", the low-budget one starring Debbie Rochon, but this was still very decent and I might give it another watch soon.

surreal


BlodwynPig


Famous Mortimer

I'd love it if they did "From Beyond". I'm guessing "At The Mountains Of Madness" is a bit out of their budget range.

Puce Moment

You've just reminded of that 80s From Beyond adaptation which I remember rather liking. It's probably shit as anything.

Famous Mortimer

Quote from: Puce Moment on January 22, 2020, 02:57:43 PM
You've just reminded of that 80s From Beyond adaptation which I remember rather liking. It's probably shit as anything.
I watched it a few years back and it was decent. But pretty much all I watch is trashy B-movies so it had a low bar to clear.

purlieu

I hope it's The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath.

BlodwynPig


Gonk

Just seen it and it's bloody great. Colin Stetson wailing away on the saxophone in the background, sinister pink/purple colour that's very easy to describe as pink/purple that no fucker's seen before, bit of the Thing, bit of family sometimes getting on in a nice house in the middle of fuck knows where near Arkham, heapings of Cage being Cage. Very very b-movie, enjoyable cinema film. 6.1 on IMDB but that's usually cult film territory, so no big surprise.

phantom_power

There is a 2012 film version of the story on Amazon Prime at the moment if anyone is interested. I don't know how good it is

Kryton

Quote from: Gonk on March 11, 2020, 11:22:36 PM
Just seen it and it's bloody great. Colin Stetson wailing away on the saxophone in the background, sinister pink/purple colour that's very easy to describe as pink/purple that no fucker's seen before, bit of the Thing, bit of family sometimes getting on in a nice house in the middle of fuck knows where near Arkham, heapings of Cage being Cage. Very very b-movie, enjoyable cinema film. 6.1 on IMDB but that's usually cult film territory, so no big surprise.

That's actually reassuring.
Although in my head-canon the colour is a kind of yellow/green.

Cuntbeaks

Watched this tonight and mostly enjoyed it. I felt it peaked a bit early and the rest was just a bit of an echo chamber.

If a mash up of The Thing, Poltergeist and The Evil Dead whilst on two microdots sounds like fun, then get in among it.

timebug

Lasted about twenty minutes,and felt an uncontrollable urge to gnaw my own leg off. Cage has never been convincing to me, in anything I have ever seen him in. So I went back to reading my current book. I am a huge Lovecraft fan (His writings, not the man himself!) but this was like a poorly done episode of The Twilight Zone or whatever.