Color Out of Space

A family bound together living far away from the closest town, goes about their habitual routines in a forest lush and haunting.

Lavinia (Madeleine Arthur) plays occultist, little Jack (Julian Hilliard) seeks clarification, Benny (Brendan Meyer) hides and smokes that reefer, while Mom and Dad (Joely Richardson as Theresa and Nicolas Cage as Nathan) sit back and dream.

As their idyllic bucolic hideaway suddenly receives a visitor from space, a giant meteor lighting up the heavens, remaining solid as it swiftly descends.

At first things seem quite ordinary, even if a local television crew comes calling, without much of a story to go on, apart from a comic lack of rehearsal.

But something's strangely spellbound and new flowers start to appear, the alpacas slightly on edge, their neighbour (Tommy Chong as Ezra) even more otherworldly.

For extraterrestrial entities have inhospitably stowed away, upon it, radiating inorganic rectitude, which mutates grassroots life.

Capable of transforming both solids and immaterials, without recourse to pattern or schematic, it virulently asserts conceited conflict, while transfusing spiritual venom.

Communications function no longer.

They're cut off from the outside world.

With only cohesivity to rely on.

As their family vouchsafes the nuclear.

I wonder what others thought of Richard Stanley's Color Out of Space?

I could only sort of get into it, I felt like it was missing something.

But I often don't get campy horror or fail to see what others cherish, their immersion in the genre more full-on, more attuned to shocking hysterics.

Perhaps I'm too old school, but I kept wishing the cast had been larger, that more characters had encountered the lifeforce, to be botanically decomposed.

John Carpenter's The Thing may have been released in 1982, but it's become somewhat of a classic, so it may be too early to be paying unacknowledged homage, its reverberations still starkly dishevelling.

I thought Ezra's first scene was all too short and brief, it didn't leave me hangin', wanting more, it left me frustrated that I'd have to wait.

For more.

It's clear they need to vacate as soon as humanly possible yet he crawls into the well? I'm thinking there was something cool there I didn't get, like most of Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, or Killer Klowns from Outer Space?

I did love Return of the Killer Tomatoes!

I was searching for some memorable lines chaotically delivered by an impassioned Nicolas Cage, too, which would have reminded me of old school Twin Peaks or even Q, but if they were there I didn't detect them, my loss, no doubt, to be certain.

Color Out of Space still appeared to be the genuine article, like bona fide midnight mayhem, my apologies for wandering adrift, I totally did not get it.

Even if I applaud the viral nature of its mysterious antagonist, like an enviroalien consciousness, like tangible biological thought, or the horrors of forever chemicals.

Toxic waste.

Fluorocarbons.

DEET.