A Caged Double Feature- Part 1: Don't Judge a Cage By It's Color

So, just to start us off on the appropriate foot: I fucking love Nic Cage.

This face ALWAYS means I'm about to have a good time.

I really do, and it's not in an ironic "OMG his movies are so bad, he's so over the top!" kind of way. I'm not a Cage-centric ironic hipster about it, and I don't have any intention of lampooning him here.

So I don't bury the lede on this double header too soon, I wanna go into why very briefly before we dive right in. I always admire fearless artists, and I'm going to return to that point in a moment when we discuss our first film (and its film-maker). And Nic? Ohhh, Mr Cage doesn't know the meaning of the word. diving headfirst into every performance I've seen him give, Nicolas Cage might just be the hardest working man in show business in sheer force, if not quantity or quality per se. He experiments. He tries to find the way to bring his character to life that literally no one else could have thought of, let alone topped.
I have not seen every Cage picture, but if someone brings him up, I'm going to sing his praises and if someone asks if I wanna see a movie, a really easy way to make me say yes is to let me know he is in it. But- this isn't a blog about Nic (though I might make one of them, one day, if I'm feeling squirrely). I want to mostly do what it says on the airplane in the back-ground: drop the spook on ya, and talk about horror movies and shit... 

So let's get to that part, huh?

I: The Return of a "Lost Soul" to Film-Making

Oh, how dearly did I wait for this movie... I fell in love with the bizarre, atmospheric style of South African born Richard Stanley when I was house-sitting for an old girlfriend and was mooching off her Netflix. This was some years back, before Netflix had grown into the beast it is today and was still prone to have the odd nugget of strangeness clinging to its newborn hide.

 And it was there that I found Hardware, Stanley's sophomore directorial effort, and still my favorite. His style, world-weaving, and sick sense of humor just vibed with me, and I wanted to see what else his name was on. To my surprise, I found only two (2) other examples of his work. And one of them was a movie I had seen before! But alas, as I found out more, the apprehension turned to disappointment. Short version (longer version can be found in the excellent documentary "Lost Soul"): Richard Stanley rose high and fast, then was immediately eaten alive by studio meddling, famous asshole Val Kilmer, mega-famous giver of zero fucks Marlon Brando, and a seemingly cursed production of The Island of Doctor Moreau that he was fired from shortly after production began, which I had seen as a young boy and said: "...huh."

In the days in which I found his work, Richard Stanley was exploring old castles looking for ghosts, wrestling with the legacy of his very mystical mother, and being super-mega-Alan-Moore-reading-the-name-of-God-in-his-belly-button-lint STRANGE. And above all, he didn't appear to have much interest in returning to film-making. Sad, but his two and a quarter films were still pretty damn cool.

And so was his hat.

But the rumblings began, quietly at first, like the ominous hill noises of far-off Dunwich. Interest in his films had resurged with the aforementioned documentary, and his own interest in returning seemed to come with it, for the right project. One of the ones he wanted to get done? A biopic he himself had penned based on the life of Howard Philips Lovecraft called simply "Providence"...
He returned to the directors chair briefly, but for the first time in almost two decades, to helm a segment of the anthology film Theater Bizarre about witches, sex, and frogs. Could a return to features be far behind? 

Yes. It could be far behind. Cuz it took forever for this movie to get made.
but. it. was. WORTH. IT.

"Now make this blog about me again, Alex."
"Yes, Mister Cage."

Color Out of Space is based on the short story of the same name by H.P. Lovecraft. For those of my readers who don't know who this is, he is basically the father of weird fiction. NOT science fiction, that's Mary Shelley's baby and I'm not taking that away from her.

Weird Fiction is a whole different beast. It's less 'Star Trek' or 'Alien', more... The Twilight Zone, or  Stephen King. It's a place where the strange happens and it can shatter you with the realization that not everything in the Universe has an explanation that you can comprehend, and if you could you would stop being human...And it's a place where Nic Cage slots in perfectly.

 As an actor, he is straight up made for this kind of material. In last year's Mandy he proved this without a doubt, and much of the same production and business team that made that hallucinogenic mind-melter of a picture re-teamed for thins one, with our man Richard Stanley in the captain seat.

The film and story revolve around the Gardners and their three children Benny, Lavinia, and Jack, residing on a remote farm in Lovecraft Country: New England. Their idyllic life is a little unusual, as the Gardner's themselves are, but despite some troubles in their past,( including the ghosts of an abusive dad for Nic and a recent cancer experience for his wife played with a haunting frailty by Joely Richardson) their life seems to be settling into a period of peace once more after too many years of worry and woe.

BUUUUUT that never lasts...not in Lovecraft Country...

All that literally comes crashing to an end when a meteorite crashes to the ground on their property.
But this isn't just a rock. It carries something with it. Within it. Something indescribable. A color. A force. A sinister intelligence, and a corrupting power that infects everything it touches...

However, I'm not here to regurgitate plot. That isn't how I want to do things here. But I am gonna talk about stuff I like, in much the same way as I would if I were say, telling you personally. I'm hoping it can be way for some of you to feel closer to me and for me to feel closer to you during this whole....thing going on. (For those reading this in the future, I really hope this all passes fine and nobody talks about toilet paper or COVID-19 anymore, except in a "Wow, wild times right?" kind of way). So, anyway:

II: Love and Craft, and the Horror of Both

A level indicator of how bizarre this movie is is that I have gotten this far into a discussion of it without even mentioning the fact that Tommy Chong is in this picture.

Resident expert in seeing imaginary colors.

Every choice made early, pays off in incredibly satisfying and sometimes horrifying ways. From Theresa Gardener's creeping sense of body dysmorphia, Nathan's glib impression of his dad (channeling his first truly bizarre performance in "Vampire's Kiss" at sudden and jarring times), little things grow to become big things, and those big things grow to become things Man wasn't meant to see. Where things are even more interesting, are the details changed or enhanced to tell the story in the modern day.

See, in the original yarn, the tale is told by a nameless academic (a Lovecraft staple), years after it originally happened, largely through memory and testimony of those that survived the incident, namely a mysterious old man (another staple) named Ezra, before revealing that the threat of the evil that blighted this place may not be entirely dissipated (yet another Lovecraft staple). This gives the short a two-track structure where we can step back into the framing tale to breathe as things get ever more awful for the story versions of the Gardners. But that is done away with in the film, making the story richer for it, allowing the dread to build, our narrator (and the great Thomas Chong) to experience the tale in real time, and for the film (written by Stanley as well as directed) to indulge in the main element so often lost in adaptations of H.P.'s work: his prose.
For those who came in late: No one wrote stories the way Lovecraft did. His vocabulary was immense and that can make the stories a little impenetrable for the beginner, but the beauty and flowing quality of his thoughts as they translated horrible idea into chilling reality for the reader is second to none. And that prose gets to flow through the beginning and end of the film, book-ending the tale with lyrical horror poetry. That's H.P.'s prose however. His dialog is...awful, but that is to be expected from someone as socially awkward and isolated as he was. As such, characters rarely talk to one another in real time in Lovecraft, instead opting to relay the idea of what was said through later recollection of our narrator.

Of course, in film you can't do that. And in this film, Stanley proves that his old wit and sly humor has remained 100 percent intact from his "Hardware" days, giving character interactions his own eccentric charm. 
The younger characters feel very fresh and energetic, (I especially like the choice to have our narrator, here named Ward Philips as a winking reference to Howard Philips Lovecraft himself, played by Elliot Knight a black actor from the UK. If you read the original tales, you'll know why sooner or later) while the older generation feel more like what I'm sure Stanley is himself these days: old mystics with some wild adventures behind them but new stories to tell in the here and now. But that dividing line between the young and the old becomes a fault-line, then a schism as the influence of the Color spreads through the land and the minds of the family. 

"What the prog-rock is goin' on 'round here?"

And that is where one of my favorite flourishes comes in. For anyone who hasn't caught the gist yet, there is a nice, succinct scene in which the allegory for the now is laid out for anyone who hasn't caught it yet. But suffice to say that the younger generation is aware there is a HUGE problem, while the older one tries desperately to hang on to what they know and, ahem, deny that anything is happening that is out of the ordinary outside of their sudden celestial visitor.

"R'lyeh, Boomer."

But eventually the denial does more harm than good once the influence of the Color goes beyond anyone's control or understanding, seeping into the water, the fauna, and the flesh of everyone around it. And that's where the story takes a turn away from the source that at first I didn't wholly agree with but has grown on me the more I've thought on it.

 In the original tale, one of the more unsettling things about the description of the Color's effect on the land and animals is how eerily similar it was in action and reaction to the effects of radiation. About ten to fifteen years before the first atom bomb was detonated and showed us what it would really do to people. We had ideas, sure, Marie Curie had done her research obviously, but the tangible, known quantity that "Radiation = You're gonna have a bad time" was not commonly known and Lovecraft's prescience on this subject puts him right there with Asimov and Roddenberry as far as speculative authors getting things very close to the mark.

In the film, this by now almost mundane form of desolation and ruination is enhanced with a squelching, body-horror kaleidoscope of flesh and twisting perception that rivals the prime of both David Cronenberg and John Carpenter, and it utterly shocked and disgusted me in the best ways. My initial disagreement with the change, that something sad and almost contemplative became something more in your face and grandiose, melted away when I saw that it wasn't sacrificing story or character to do it. No matter how grandly things mutate ("There's something wrong with the alpacas." has never been a more ominous phrase) the core remains the Gardner's attempts to cope with what is happening no matter how nightmarish it becomes.

Sound familiar?

This, but with more insanity and purple.

III: Fun Place to Go, Lovecraft Country... But Don't Drink the Water

For every squamous moment of body deformation or mutilation, there's a tender moment of coping with the sudden change in your loved ones from illness or disability, or the dejected, dissociating aftermath of a histrionic release of emotion. (From Nic, obviously) And it builds to a pitch-perfect recreation of the spirit if not the letter of the original story and retains all the mental impact reading the original short years and years ago had on me in a new and vibrant way.

Speaking of vibrant, I wanna wrap this up on how beautiful this movie is.Since the Color was described in the story as something that our eyes couldn't make sense of and we didn't have a name for, and that is nearly impossible to put on film, the makers opted for the very clever trick of using Magenta.

No, not that one,

See magenta...isn't a real color. Stay with me here, magenta doesn't exist as a single wavelength of light. Instead, it's what's called an extra-spectral color created literally by our minds when the red and blue rods in our eyes interact with specific circumstances to create it. SO, what that means is, IF we saw the Color Out of Space, this one is what we would likely see since our puny brains would have no clue what to tell us was fucking happening. I love when a movie does it's homework like this. Got a headache thinking about that yet?     ANYWAY...
Steve Annis was the DP on this and every frame is just a painting, especially once the haunting beauty of the horror almost makes you wish it wouldn't stop. Checking his credits, he's worked on lots of music videos and his attention to getting the dreamlike visuals just right really shows from that kind of background. It evokes my favorite scene from the source, where a character pauses to take in the beauty of the trees waving in the wind...before realizing there isn't even a breeze...

In short, this movie rocks.
I'll just show myself out...

So do yourself a favor if you're looking to get your mind blown like I did, this movie is on demand on Amazon Prime, go watch it and enjoy. But be careful around the barn. The alpacas are acting awful strange...

Next time: More Nic Cage as domestic farce meets The Purge in "Mom & Dad"!