Nicolas Cage continues hot streak with 'Color Out of Space'

Nicolas Cage is in an interesting phase of his very long, incredibly durable career. He doesn’t get to headline blockbusters anymore so he largely makes indistinguishable direct to streaming genre movies. Apparently he is so deep in debt this is a necessity for him.

But there is another type of movie he has been making: uncompromising indie movies that take full advantage of his batshit crazy persona.
Color Out of Space is one of those movies.

His performance in Color Out of Space frequently ventures into camp and he brings back the higher pitched nerd vocal register he once deployed in Peggy Sue Got Married with a dash of Vampire’s Kiss. This may not be your cup of tea, but if you are a Cage fan like I am, you’ll enjoy this new film as a worthy follow up to his last sci-fi horror romp Mandy.

He plays the patriarch of a pretty oddball family (the daughter practices witchcraft and he is raising alpacas) that only grows stranger when a meteorite like object crash lands in their front lawn.

It emanates a striking magenta type light and writer/draw Richard Stanley (who has been on some kind self imposed exile from Hollywood for years) does a terrific job of creating both an alluring and unnerving visual tapestry.

Fairly quickly and for reasons that are never fully explain the family begins to fall apart figuratively and literally. And rather than going heavy and dreary it turns darkly comic (a younger Tim Burton might have done wonders with it) as Cage tries mightily to maintain the status quo when chaos is erupting all around him.

I wasn’t familiar with the HP Lovecraft material going in so I don’t know how closely Stanley’s film tracks but I will say he does a terrific job of creating a sense of inevitable dread about what this strange color (emanating from the point of the crash site outside their home) will do to this family.

What happens in the last act is truly grotesque and unpredictably scary. I appreciate Stanley’s commitment to using practical effects while possible and avoiding horror movie cliches (I’m looking at you It: Chapter Two).

The movie also manages to be very fun — even when it ventures into more grisly territory. It probably might do well with a more mainstream audience if it were marketed the right way.

Hopefully people will find it and pass on the word. For me, this is the first great new movie of 2020 and yet more proof that with the right material — Nicolas Cage is still one of the most riveting actors in the movies.