Color Out Of Space is the only movie I've managed to see in a cinema this year, due to parenthood reasons. I managed to see it just before we all went into lockdown, and it was, if nothing else, a good reminder that as horrible and catastrophic as the coronavirus could be, there are worse things that can happen to the human body.
It certainly starts off with a decent dose of moody dread, and Nicholas Cage is actually pretty good in the first section, full of dad jokes and weird obsessions with alpacas ,but it doesn't take too long before you start saying things out loud like 'why the fuck are you climbing down that well?'.
It just gets too dumb. Watching it, there is a desperate urge to tell people to just walk the fuck away - a brief attempt to paint this as impossible because reality is bending around the family is scuppered by a horse who shows more smarts than the human victims and just gets the fuck outta there.
And ultimately, it fails in the same way almost every cinematic attempt at Lovecraft does - it tries to put the impossible on screen, and there is literally no way to capture on film the unbearable sights and sensations that Lovecraft subjected his unfortunate protagonists to. For a moment, it looks like you're never going to see the most extreme example of body horror in the film, but then it slithers into plain sight and while it's certainly gross, it's not mind-bendingly awful
And that impossibility is there in the color itself, with a shade that is impossible to describe on paper turns out to be a pinkish/purple haze. It's certainly pretty, but ignores everything that is really intriguing about Lovecraftian horror (once you get past the racism and general misanthropy) - you just can't film his impossible.
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