In Richard Stanley’s brilliant, nightmarish, hallucinatory version of a H. P. Lovecraft story, a meteorite falls from the sky outside Nathan Gardner’s (Nicolas Cage) remote woodland Arkham farmhouse. Gardner lives there with his wife (Joley Richardson), their three children and some alpacas he is raising. The meteorite glows an unearthly purple color and after a lightning storm it seems to have dissolved into the earth. Unfortunately, weird, unrecognizable flowers start sprouting from the ground. Hideous, many-eyed insects fly up from the well, whose water is clearly corrupted by the mysterious falling star.
A college student sent to survey the water (Elliot Knight) is alarmed by the contamination in the area and begs everyone around- including an elderly hippie (Tommy Chong) living in the woods- to only drink bottled water. But within no time things begin to take an even more deadly turn for the worse.
The alpacas begin to mutate. The skin on Nathan’s arms begins to turn to leather and he becomes more manic. (Hell, it’s Nicolas Cage, remember?) The young son (Julian Hilliard) seems to have conversations with something within the well. The pot-smoking older son (Brendan Meyer) has frequent trouble with time loss. The daughter (Madeleine Arthur) practices wiccan rites to protect her family. But it’s too late for that.
This is definitely closer in spirit to Lovecraft’s short story than Die, Monster, Die! (a 1965 version starring Boris Karloff and Nick Adams). It lifts descriptive passages (provided by voice-overs by the surveyor) right from the story. (Supposedly “The Colour Out Of Space,” published in 1927, was one of Lovecraft’s personal favorites). What Stanley does so beautifully is to capture the transforming terror of this falling meteorite- which mutates everything around it into an alien landscape.
Richard Stanley began his career with a bang with Hardware and Dust Devil but was derailed when he was fired during the ill-fated production of The Island Of Dr. Moreau– thanks to the on-set shenanigans of Marlon Brando and Val Kilmer, who also made life hell for the director brought in to finish the film- John Frankenheimer. This was fabulously chronicled in the amazing documentary Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey Of Richard Stanley’s Island Of Dr. Moreau.
But Stanley returns here with an eerie vengeance. Cinematographer Steve Annis’s gorgeous visuals, the discordant soundtrack by Colin Stetson– all help create a universe spinning crazily out of control. Sure, Cage gets to go full-tilt Cage, but it’s justified here, and he helps add another layer of unease to the film. A frightening, gorgeous film.