麻豆传媒

Film

Written and directed by Richard Stanley

NICOLAS CAGE鈥橲 career-warping efforts to clear his tax debts after problems with the IRS continue with yet another relatively low-budget movie, Color Out of Space, a film no one expects much of. It is in US cinemas now; by the time it hits UK screens on 28 February, it will already be available on Blu-ray.

But have you ever watched a bad film and found yourself dreaming about it long afterwards? Color Out of Space is one of those.

Its origins date to March 1927, when author H. P. Lovecraft wrote what would become his favourite short story. In 鈥淭he Colour Out of Space鈥�, a meteor crashes into a farmer鈥檚 field in the Massachusetts hills. His crops grow huge, but prove inedible. His livestock go mad. So, in the end, does the farmer, haunted by a colour given off by a visiting presence in the land: a glow that belongs on no ordinary spectrum.

This is Lovecraft鈥檚 riff on a theme beloved of science fiction at the turn of the 2oth century: the existence of new rays, and with them, new ways of seeing. The 1890s and 1900s were, after all, radiant years. Victor Schumann discovered ultraviolet radiation in 1893. Wilhelm R枚ntgen discovered X-rays in 1895. Henri Becquerel discovered radioactivity in 1896. J. J. Thomson discovered that cathode rays were streams of electrons in 1897. Prosper-Ren茅 Blondlot discovered N-rays in 1903 鈥� only they turned out not to exist, an artefact of observational error and wishful thinking.

鈥淐olor Out of Space mashes up horror, psychological drama, and alien invasion鈥�

The last of those is pretty much what the local media assume has happened when Cage鈥檚 character, Nathan Gardner, the not-very-effective head of a household that is relocating to the country after unspecified health problems and financial setbacks, describes the malevolent light he catches spilling at odd moments from his well. The man is a drunk. A fantasist. An eccentric.

The film is yet another attempt to fuse gothic horror with a contemporary setting. Director Richard Stanley (who brought us 1990鈥檚 Hardware, another valuable bad movie) has written a script that, far from smoothing out the discrepancies between modern and pre-modern proprieties, manners and ways of speaking, leaves them jangling in a way that makes you wonder what on Earth is going on.

And what is going on, most of the time, is Cage. Has anyone ever conveyed so raucously, and yet so well, the misery, the frustration, the rage, the self-hatred of weak men? Every time he gets into a fist fight with a car interior I think: Ah, Nicolas, c鈥檈st moi.

Even better for the film, Cage鈥檚 on-screen wife here is played by Joely Richardson, an actor who packs a lifetime鈥檚 disappointment into a request to pass the sugar.

Alien life isn鈥檛 like Earth life and to confront it is to invite madness. That鈥檚 the general idea. But with tremendous support from on-screen children played by Madeleine Arthur and Brendan Meyer, Cage and Richardson turn what might have been a series of uninteresting personal descents into a family tragedy of Jacobean proportions. If ever hell were other people, then at its deepest point you would find the Gardner family, sniping at each other across the dinner table.

Color Out of Space mashes up psychological drama, horror and alien invasion. It isn鈥檛 a film you admire 鈥� it鈥檚 one you get into internal arguments over, trying to sort all the bits out. In short, it does what it sets out to do. It sticks.