Colour Out Of Space

Drag Me To Well

Colour Out Of Space
(aka Color Out Of Space)
Portugal/USA 2019 Directed by Richard Stanley
Screening at the London Film Festival 8th October 2019

Okay, so the sixth and final film of my London Film Festival experience this year was also a treat, in the form of a new H. P. Lovecraft adaptation. Now, I’ve always had a soft spot for Lovecraft but he’s a hard writer to get up on screen. Mostly, I suspect, because the majority of what he wrote used the short story form so it’s hard to expand out into a feature anyway. Also, Lovecraft’s preoccupation of describing ancient, ‘nameless’ horrors or alluding to the unspeakable things which happen rather than actually giving you full descriptions... the literary equivalent of hiding your monsters in the shadows so nobody can see how bad your creature costume is... doesn’t help potential film-makers when it comes to trying to adapt his stuff. I do, however, tend to enjoy a certain amount of what passes for ‘screen Lovecraft’. I could happily rewatch Die, Monster, Die, a 1965 attempt at bringing The Colour Out Of Space to the screen and I was even tolerant when they insisted on presenting one of his key stories, The Case Of Charles Dexter Ward, as Edgar Allan Poe’s The Haunted Palace... I still don’t know how they got away with that one, though.

So, yeah, I was chomping at the bit to see this new movie but not, necessarily, because it was based on Lovecraft (although that was always going to be one of the plus points) but because this was the triumphant return... and having seen the film I can certainly confirm it is ‘full on triumphant’... of much loved director Richard Stanley. I loved his movies ‘back in the day’ when he directed Hardware and Dust Devil but, it appears that this is the first feature film he’s attempted to make since, by my reckoning, 1992. I’ve seen a few shorts and documentaries by him since then but he’s been hiding in the shadows for a while now due to various reasons, some of them personal, and now somebody has let him have another proper crack at making a low budget feature and... well, good idea. I just wanted to see it regardless because I know how special his first two films are.

So I was delighted to be in attendance at one of the two screenings that Colour Out Of Space got at the London Film Festival this year and even more happy that the great man was in attendance himself, to give an intro to the movie and then get into a question and answer session with the audience afterwards. He’s got one of those hypnotic voices I always find so easy to listen to for long periods of time which, in a way, is just as well because he is a bit of a talker.

So anyway, based on a work by Lovecraft, a writer who Stanley said in the Q & A that his mother got him into at the age of seven, Colour Out Of Space stars Nicholas Cage as Nathan, the head of a secluded homestead in New Orleans where he keeps a farm of tomatoes and alpacas and lives with his wife Thereza, played by Joely Richardson and his three children Benny (played by Brendan Meyer), young Jack (played by Julian Hilliard) and Lavinia (played by Madeleine Arthur).

The film is re-set in modern times but as the film’s ‘outsider’ character, a water surveyor played by Elliot Knight, walks into the forest and finds Lavinia, she is dressed in antiquated looking clothes and standing by her horse as she is trying to ‘summon up a spell’. It’s a lovely opening actually because, it’s not until Knight walks in on her and you can see him wearing modern clothes, that you are able to get a better time fix on the thing. It’s almost like you are looking at something which Roger Corman might have made in the mid-1960s for a minute. Knight’s character is called Ward Phillips which is, of course, a shortening of the original writer’s first two initials, Howard Philips.

Actually, the film is absolutely cluttered with allusions to the life and literature of Howard Phillips Lovecraft, with references to Dunwich and Arkham and all kinds of things. It didn’t bother me too much though because this production is so well put together. I was a little disappointed, truth be told, that the Necronomicon, the fictitious, extremely rare and demonic tome mentioned in many a Lovecraft tale... and quite a few other tales in both literature and film over the years... was reduced to being a small paperback volume in this. I got over it fairly quickly though. There are also a fair few references, I think, to the previous films of Richard Stanley ‘hidden in plain sight’ on occasion, such as the graffiti scrawled on the eldest son’s bedroom wall stating that... “No Flesh Shall Be Spared”... which is, of course, a reference to Hardware.

The film is... and this really isn’t surprising given as it’s Lovecraft... not entirely faithful to the original Lovecraft short. This is a movie and demands changes to be able to pass into this format, especially in a world where every film pretty much has to strive to be commercially popular now. However, unlike a fair few adaptations of the writer’s works, it is actually quite faithful in its own ways to the spirit and basic plot points of the thing. So yes, there are alpacas and crazy, almost Gigeresque... perhaps I should say Cthulhuesque in this case... monsters but various key points are put in place and faithfully maintained to anchor the film firmly in the source material quite overtly and positively so. In terms of modern adaptation, it holds up quite well. I was surprised when I heard the astonishingly low budget for this film too (around 6 million dollars) since it looks way more expensive, I think, than what it was actually put together for.

Beautiful shot set ups, of course, as you would expect form Stanley and the colours are, absolutely wonderful. There’s some nice purples in there. It probably doesn’t help matters for potential directors that, if memory recalls (it’s been at least ten years since I read this and probably twenty more before that even), the ‘colour’ out of space is an alien colour which has no equivalent on Earth so, given the challenge of an impossible colour palette to work around, I think the director here does pretty amazingly well.

I’m not going to say much about the story beats on this one... the meteor, the well etc... because you know, pretty much (and Mr. Stanley said this himself in his Q&A session, after pointing out the difficulties of adapting Lovecraft for the screen) that as far as human characters go it’s almost always going to end in either madness or death (usually both). There is, in fact, a last person standing moment in the film but I think this is very much in keeping with the original short and the nice ‘absence of colour’ in certain parts of the end sequence was also nicely done and enough to distract me on a visual level anyway.

If I had any criticisms of the film then I think, purely going on this first viewing, that things maybe do get a bit over the top towards the end... not in terms of content but in what they ‘show’ of the content. Of course, you expect that of a Nicolas Cage film now anyway but I was amused to hear Mr. Stanley saying, after the film had finished, that Cage “isn’t nearly as crazy as people think he is”. I always suspected as much but, of course, coming from a director as delightfully crazy as Richard Stanley anyway, I’m not 100% sure that’s a stirling endorsement.

Another slight criticism would be the title, which on the print I saw (even though I saw it in rainy England), was written as Color Out Of Space, in the American spelling. However, I did notice that the spelling was written in the English manner on the credit which read something along the lines of... based on the short story The Colour Out Of Space by H. P. Lovecraft... so that kind of mollified me a little. As did the appearance of Tommy Chong in the movie.

Oh... I almost forgot to mention the score by Colin Stetson, which I thought was pretty good. It does call attention to itself in various scenes but I don’t see anything wrong with that and it does well to help maintain a level of unease and strangeness to the proceedings. It’s a nice scene setter too, with the breathtaking opening shots of the surrounding forest before the meteor crashes down made somehow eerie by Stetson’s, almost ‘new age’ moments within the score. I’d grab this one quickly if only the thing was out on a nice CD.

And that’s me pretty much done with Colour Out Of Space and I can’t wait until this thing comes out on Blu Ray (hopefully sooner rather than later). It was a thrill to see a film I’d been really looking forward to more than most others this year and a very special cherry on top of the icing to actually get to see Richard Stanley ‘in the flesh’, as it were.

And that’s also me done with the London Film Festival this year. I’ve seen some truly remarkable films this time around and I had a great time with all of them. Looking forward, now, to the next festival I have tickets for... which is the mini FrightFest Halloween all dayer event at the start of November. Hopefully my ‘film stamina’ will prove its worth as I try and survive from 10am in the morning until 12.30am the next morning, devouring various new horror movies as they flash before my eyes. In the meantime, I hope you enjoyed my coverage of the films I saw at this year’s London Film Festival and normal review service of three a week should resume very shortly, with two new cinema releases up next, fingers crossed. Thanks for reading.

The Death of “Superman Lives”: What Happened?

Clerks Kent

The Death of “Superman Lives”: What Happened?
USA 2015
Directed by Jon Schnepp
Super Skull Ship Multizone Blu Ray

You know, I’ve been a big fan of Kevin Smith since first seeing and admiring Clerks, a few years after its initial cinema run, and one of the most entertaining stories I ever heard him tell was the routine where he goes through his side of what happened when he was hired to rewrite a draft of the screenplay to the movie Superman Lives... or Superman Reborn as it was when he was first brought on board. It’s an amusing story and, basically, Kevin Smith showed how a messed up few people started bringing on ridiculous sounding ideas and when Tim Burton came on board the project, Smith was told to depart.

I’ve always wanted to know more of what went on behind the scenes though and now, thanks to this crowd funded documentary by Jon Schnepp, we can get at least a little more of a glimpse of not only the stupidity and bad decisions which brought this movie down but also a look at some of the hard work the very talented people who were hired to conceptualise this preposterous venture did for the cause.

I remember reading about the pre-production of the Superman Lives movie when it was happening back in the early 1990s. Bringing on Nicholas Cage seemed a bit strange in terms of casting the film at the time (although I now believe he could do something credible, at least) and the designs of the costume which were leaking, backing up the idea that the studio were going to dump the famous look of the Man of Steel, wasn’t doing much to turn me on to the project, to say the least. I was kinda glad when it fell through at the time although, I have to say, the subsequent Superman movies we’ve had in its wake, especially the last one, have been less than what they could have been.

For this documentary, Schnepp has interviews with several of the key players involved including, of course, the aforementioned Kevin Smith... along with Tim Burton and Jon Peters. I’m really puzzled as to why Peters agreed to do this because, although he seems to be going through the motions, in some places, of defending himself against Kevin Smith’s portrayal of him and his part in this fiasco, it seems to me he comes off really badly. Peters says some things here and you kinda want to take him at face value but then, when you realise that what he is saying in some instances seems to contradict little details of what the facts are... and then you stack it up next to stuff a lot of other people say about Peters, well... if it comes to the question of Peters VS Smith, I think I personally believe Smith but, luckily, we have this documentary so you can make up your own mind.

Now Smith’s involvement ended very early on but we have some of the other writers highlighted in this film and also the conceptual designs and paintings done for this production. Some of it looks great and some of it looks, ill informed. It doesn’t take long before you realise the production had a mountain of really great talent working on this thing that were, somehow, not really handled in a way that would work for the studio. And you also have Tim Burton who comes off as quite an interesting guy on this. It’s obvious that he doesn’t value Kevin Smith's contribution still... and I was so on for this documentary to have Smith and Burton in the same room together and burying the hatchet because, it seems in terms of their attitude to the production, they have a lot of common ground. Alas, it’s not something Schnepp was able to pull off in this one but it seems clear to me, from Burton’s choice of words in some scenes that... yeah... he’s not the greatest fan of Peters either. I may be wrong but... see what you think.

The documentary is really nicely put together and includes a lot of test footage of Cage trying on various Superman suits and it also addresses the issue of the “regeneration suit” which was misconstrued by a lot of people interested in Superman Lives when it was seen at the time. Using live action and animated scenarios put in to ape some of the scenes which never were, Schnepp manages to work with the material he’s got of people describing their involvement in the project but still makes it relatively entertaining and interesting for even the casual observer. The scoring got to me a little bit and I think it was either dialled to prominently in the final mix or maybe was a little inappropriate and distracting in places... but overall the film is a nice piece of work and, certainly, something people interested in this story definitely need to see. I don’t rate the movie as highly as a similar project, Jodorowsky’s Dune (reviewed by me here) but that’s quite possibly because the stories told in this one were never gonna be as crazy as what was going on with the Jodorosky project... but it is a definite one not to miss if you are interested in the production of movies and just how badly they can go wrong.

Ultimately, the message I took away from this documentary is that, although I never even wanted to see the finished project, there was a great tragedy here on the film's cancellation because a lot of work had gone into this from a lot of people and, even if the movie had been made and received badly, it would have at least been a very interesting failure... for sure. Certainly, with all these years gone by and with the sense of perspective watching The Death Of Superman Lives: What Happened? has given me in regards to the fate of this film, it’s one I can imagine might have been better left running its course. At the same time, I can totally understand why Warner Brothers pulled the plug on it a number of years into the project.  But, whether you would have been a fan of the finished movie or not, this account of why it didn’t happen and, as interestingly, how bits of it did happen for a while, is certainly something most fans of movies and superheroes are going to want to take a look at. The film is available for download and in physical form from this website here... http://tdoslwh.myshopify.com/

Season Of The Witch

Witch Black

Season Of The Witch
2011 USA
Directed by Dominic Sena/Bret Ratner
Momentum Blu B

Warning: Spoilers of the witch in this one...

A few years ago a movie called Black Death came out at cinemas and I was hoping it was going to be a nice little tale of swords and sorcerers in medieval England. Instead, although skillfully put together and certainly quite gripping in places, I was disappointed in the film because the whole thing took on a certain ‘scooby-doo’ aspect when it came to the actual witchcraft element of the tale and, tonally, the film bore more resemblance to films like Witchfinder General than anything that could have been conjured up as something ‘not of this world’. I reviewed it here and, though I can appreciate it on some level, it’s really not my kind of thing in terms of things I’d watch for entertainment. That kind of subject matter really needs to be treated in a more ‘fun’ fashion I feel, otherwise it becomes fatally serious.

Not too long after, Season Of The Witch got released in cinemas over here having suffered, it turns out, severe release delays and a load of reshoots by “rescue director” Bret Ratner. I was kinda interested in seeing it to see if it did the same thing as Black Death or actually gave my b-movie monster passion a work out but, alas, the film only lasted a week at my local movie house. However, I have a friend who has been persistent that Season Of The Witch was a nice bit of film-making so, despite having been critically reviled the world over (I found this out after I’d seen the movie), when I chanced upon a copy for “the right price” (Cash Converters Blu Ray for £3.99) I decided to give my friend the benefit of the doubt and take a look at it.

I’m kinda glad I did.

The film stars Nicholas Cage and the always watchable Ron Perlman as two long serving knights who have become disillusioned with the Holy Crusades after being asked to slaughter women and children for God’s cause. They desert the army but, two months later, find themselves once again allied with the church when they are tasked, with a guide, another knight and a priest, to escort a witch to a far off monastery (requiring several days travel) to put her on trial and read from the last copy of The Book Of Soloman... as a solution to ending her witchery and lifting the plague from the land. Here, of course, it gets a bit tricky because Holy Knights and bubonic plague are two completely different time periods but, in deference to Sergio Leone’s use of the IRA in his Western A Fistful of Dynamite (aka Gui La Testa aka Duck You Sucker) I’ll turn a blind eye since it makes for a good story and in our postmodern times and attitudes I seem to be the last person upholding that kind of “finger pointing and wagging” at the sight of anachronism anyway. So I won’t spoil the party here... although it would be good if writers and directors of historically set dramas could read the odd history book once in a while.

So far, so good. We have, basically a medieval road movie with witchery, which turns out to be not just witchery, and lots of fighting and moralising and so on. Cage and Perlman make a heck of a double act as the two larger than life heroes and with various creatures to be slain, especially in the last third of the film, this is about as entertaining as any old relatively well made B-movie can get... so that’s all good. There's even a cameo by Hammer Horror stalwart Christopher Lee although, it is such that I completely failed to recognise him when he was on screen.

I especially liked that the film doesn’t scrimp on letting you know that there is truly something supernatural going on either. The opening prologue, which I suspect is a result of one of the reshoots, certainly makes it known to the audience that there are demonic forces at work here when the aftermath of a triple witch hanging ends up with one dead priest and a burned copy of the book which our heroes are later going to seek out. Followed up by a nice and exciting opening montage of Cage and Perlman fighting and drinking their way through a number of Holy Crusades, its a genuinely good set up for the movie and, although the pace slows a little to make way for things like plot and... um... well a bit of a plot anyway, the film makes good on its promise and offers up exactly the kind of movie you’d expect from taking the main quest at the heart of this film to its logical confusion. That is to say... never mind the witchery, they’ve got full on demons and possessed dead bubonic reanimated zombie priests to deal with.

Some of the photography is really beautiful and, even when it’s not, it is at least competent and this also goes for the editing in this one too. The action is not as confusing as a lot of modern Hollywood movies and you can follow it fairly well. Add in discussions by the various characters about the confusion as to whether their prisoner is a witch or not and recollections of “the good old days”, when you could be sure that a good head lopping was being administered to the proper recipient, and you have a film which is just about entertaining enough to not get boring. Add some CGI demons in the mix and you start venturing into Robert E. Howard territory too for a while.

The film ends in a way diametrically opposed to how most Hollywood films end these days... that is to say, there is some significant sacrifice on the side of the just, and I found this to be a bit of a relief to be honest, although I suspect this is one of the things that has helped the movie garner the bad reviews it has. People do not necessarily want to see their films ending this way, with fallen heroes and voice-over narrative. But I liked it... it reminded me of a crude version of the closing of Seven Samurai in some respects, although this film is truly not even close to the same league as Kurosawa’s epic masterpiece, to be sure.

But the main ingredients are here for a good time with a movie. Knights in armour, swords flashing, heads popping, zombie priests and big as f*** flying demons to boot. It may not ever really rise above the “quite entertaining” level but, compared to some modern Hollywood movies, it’s got a lot more going for it than a fair proportion of them. Give it a watch if you have nothing better to do, maybe.

Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance 3D

Blaze In Saddles

Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance

2012 USA/United Arab Emirates

Directed by Mark Neveldine & Brian Taylor

Screening at UK cinemas.

Okay, so I’m not a big fan of Nicholas Cage, it has to be said... which is why you can colour me surprised by the fact that, when I checked out his bio on the IMDB this morning, I found that I actually quite like nine of the movies that this guy’s been in. This is not a bad number, to be honest, so maybe I don’t dislike the actor as much as I thought... maybe he’s just one of those people who doesn’t always pick the best roles and occasionally gets it right. Maybe that’s it?

Anyway, Ghost Rider was never one of those comic book characters that I had a lot of passion for as a kid. Sure, the fact that he was a motorbiking fiery skeleton was cool but, I confess, the only Johnny Blaze (Ghost Rider’s human alter ego) stories I read as a kid were the ones that turned up in annuals or elaborate crossovers... so, to be honest, the only one I distinctly remember was a Marvel Treasury Edition which teamed Ghost Rider with Spider Man (a tome I’d like to get back if I could... managed to hunt down most of the treasury editions I had as a kid but there’s still a couple missing... not a lot of them survived the 1970s worldwide it seems because of their general size and unwieldiness).

When I saw the first Ghost Rider movie the combination of Nicholas Cage with a character I just didn’t have a lot of emotional investment in made going to the cinema a tough prospect but I was curious to see how well Marvel acquitted themselves with the character’s on-screen incarnation and, truth be told, I had a real blast with that first film. It wasn’t in any way complex or over-blown in intent... it was just consistently good fun which didn’t have a whole lot of substance but which was a more than pleasant way to spend and hour or two “at the pictures”. I was impressed enough with it, but not impressed enough to remember that I’d liked it quite that much so, when the sequel I never thought would get made blazed into town at my local fleapit this week, I wasn’t overly looking forward to seeing this one either, if truth be told.

And I was pleasantly surprised again. This one’s got some weaknesses, for sure, but it’s also got a whole load of plus points which, again, made for a very entertaining time at the movie house.

Opening with absolutely no sign of Cage’s Johnny Blaze character at all, the pre-title sequence is a rip roaring action fest featuring a woman (played by Violante Placido), a son she is protecting, a whole load of baddies slaughtering a monastary full of arrogant monks and an impressive action hero kind of geezah played irreverently by some cat named Idris Elba who, frankly, almost steals the show from Cage on screen and you really want to see a lot more of this likeable character as the movie roars along. This first bit is a totally high adrenalin "rush hour" of a sequence (if a little over the top) and reaches out to the audience nicely to shake them by the collar and say... forget the set ups and soul searching embedded in the characters as depicted in the first movie... the next hour and a half is gonna kick ass so saddle up for some action packed fun!

Then it’s straight into the title of the movie with Cage narrating a comic book/cartoony rendition of the back story to his character before proceeding to ignore any kind of a complex plot and hurtle along at breakneck pace. This isn’t so much about the moral concerns of the characters and Cage’s unwillingness to transform into a demon from hell at the drop of a “biker chick’s glove” as it is about adhering strictly to the school of “your-mission-if-you-choose-to-accept-it” style of “action sensation” and because of this the film works, on those terms at least, a little better than the first movie.

It’s directed by the guys who gave the world the Crank movies and both the editing and, not unsurprisingly, Nicholas Cage’s acting style reflects this. There’s a lot of ramping in this movie... you know, that effect where they speed the film and slow it down again to land in the middle of a scene. It works with the general pacing as dictated by the editing pretty well here and even manages to retain credibility when it starts off ramping backwards from a moment in a shot and then replays forwards at normal speed to allow itself to catch itself up, so to speak. That’s a gutsy editing decision right there and it almost certainly shouldn’t have worked... but by some miracle it did, so I’m not complaining.

Other elements of the film don’t work so well, however. Cage is acting like he’s overdosed on benzedrine half the time and is often behaving like he’s so wired that you wonder why the other characters are trusting him to fulfil his role in their ongoing mission. But when the transformations come and the Ghost Rider appears, there’s a few sequences where the film seems to slow down rather than speed up. There’s one scene, for instance, where the Rider is up close and personal with a bad guy for a while and he doesn’t do anything (when our acquired knowledge tells us he should be feeding on the bad guy’s soul) and it keeps cutting back and forth between reaction shots which seem, when pitched in the context of everything that’s just happened, like an interminably long time... it’s like Harold Pinter had written in a particularly long pause and then just got up and walked away from the page for a while... and it almost feels like there’s been a mistake made in the edit, or at the very least a poor judgement call. I wondered at the time I was watching this scene (which is probably not a good thing to be thinking about this kind of thing... as it happens) whether this was supposed to accompany a series of special effects shots of the man’s soul being torn from his body and that the producers either ran out of time or budget to get the effects done but left it in there anyway.

Another thing is that the latter half of the movie doesn’t quite seem to hang together so well as the opening half. There are little jumps where you feel there should have been more cohesive material between sequences and, yeah okay, it’s by the guys who made Crank but one wonders if they are transplanting that kind of editing and pacing onto a story that can’t really handle it... or whether they just didn’t get all the shots they needed but, again, didn’t have the time or money to go back and do reshoots.

All this, I’m glad to say, is secondary to my overall impression of the movie... which was that as a broad, sweeping action movie, Ghost Rider: Spirit Of Vengeance 3D works pretty well and the 3D was even quite good on this one. If you’re into what I could only describe as a modern action B-movie, like Wolverine: X-Men Origins turned out ot be, then you could do a lot worse than saddling up, getting your motor running and heading out on the highway to see this movie at your local cinema. It’s a lot of fun and it could have turned out a lot worse. A nice frivolous little movie while we wait around for the more highly anticipated comic book based releases coming out in just a few months. Enjoy!