Nicolas Cage and H.P. Lovecraft are an ideal genre-movie pair, and Color Out of Space ably channels the latter’s gift for unreal terror while providing the former with a vehicle for charmingly out-there antics. Directing his first feature since being booted off of 1996’s The Island of Dr. Moreau, Richard Stanley brings trippy majesty to his adaptation of Lovecraft’s short story about a family – led by Cage’s cassoulet-cooking dad and Joely Richardson’s breadwinning financial-whiz mom – whose lives in rural Arkham are upended after a meteor crashes in their backyard, spawning menacing magenta foliage, absorbing lightning, and radiating not-of-this-Earth colors. Madness has arrived in infinite-hued form, as Stanley evokes a sense of rifts opening between our world and the great abyss beyond, and delivers fantastical sights of both a CGI and practical-effects sort. Even amidst such insanity, however, the filmmaker never loses sight of his characters’ humanity, nor their humorousness, be it Tommy Chong’s local squatter or Cage’s paterfamilias, a dork prone to fits of rage and weirdness – such as when he demonstrates the proper way to milk an alpaca.
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