Alpaca body-horror is new, but everything else has been done a hundred times before.
Let's cut to the chase; this film awakens two groups of "cultish" fans. First you have the Richard Stanley fans - he's a director who made a few (decent?) films back in the early 90s, but is most famous for being fired from the 1996 Island of Dr Moreau. He's a super-niche-cult figure who fancies himself a bit of a warlock and wears a hat.
The second, more ancient ones are the Lovecraftians. Struggle as you try to pronounce and spell Cthulhu, squiddly all-knowing skybeast. Lovecraftian horror is basically "cosmic horror" or the horror of the great universal unknowns and the unknowable. It's a cool genre I can dig. Because this film is supposed to be a straight up adaptation of a Lovecraft story it's bringing out die-hard fans.
So there are a lot of rave reviews. But I suggest taking these with a grain of salt. It's a bit like if suddenly Tarantino made a Bukowski. Or if Nicholas Winding Refn did a Chuck Palahniuk. Or if Greta Gerwig did a Louisa May Alcott. Pair a cultish director with a cultish body of literature and you'll get a bunch of fans happy something has been made, who are completely prepared to overlook all the flaws because it's "their thing" and they feel seen. That's fine, if you're a fan.
But this film is a tragic mess and I strongly advise not spending money on it. It does have gorgeous cinematography and starts so strongly with some of the best haunting-tree imagery I have ever seen. Then it oh so quickly it forgets the trees and is lost in its own forest of characters. It becomes increasingly confused about who our main characters are.
Modern films are great at ensemble casting and team stories, but this throws a bunch of actors together and hopes for the best. I've seen it described as "like it was filmed on one weekend" and as though "every actor thinks they're starring in a different genre of film." We have the harried mother, the witchy teen girl, the stoner teen boy, the hippy hermit, the clean cut scientist, the out-there boy child and, of course, Nicholas Cage playing the stupid Dad obsessed by alpacas, farming alpacas, feeding alpacas, talking about alpacas, milking alpacas...
Where it goes the "wrongest" though, is in the way it uses so much cliche from every 80s and 90s horror/alien movie as though they are brand new. Oh no, the car won't start. Oh no, you have to leave your kids alone at night right after a weird meteor has crashed in your front yard. Oh no, weird things make everyone take up cutting themselves. Oh no, small children love to talk to mysterious aliens. Oh no, the dog fell down the well... I mean at least it's called Sammy not Timmy. Oh no, let's make some mushed-up horror puppets and cover them in blood. Oh no, now Nicholas Cage has blood on his face. Oh no, now the alien being is psychically communicating the horror of its home planet.
Oh no, I have literally seen all this before. It is like this film is made by people who are blissfully unaware there have been three decades of film development since the 80s. It signposts key ideas not with subtle foreshadowing, but with the blunt force trauma of a sledgehammer. In the first fifteen minutes it all but puts up a giant neon sign saying "THE WATER IS IMPORTANT." Perhaps if you really like the clunkiness of 80s horror it would work for you. If you like staring a lot at a tv screen going white on your own screen. If you really like the colour pink/magenta being spotlit over everything and used like a Mulligrub backdrop. If you like Nicholas Cage acting like an idiot.
There are also some really bad edits from time to time. Stuff that would be okay in a film school production, but that seem a bit embarrassing at this level. Like characters opening the same door twice in the cut. Like spatial-temporal set ups that suggest one character has walked right past another without noticing, only to then act suprised two minutes later when they see them.
To put it in bluntest terms, this film is just Close Encounters of The Third Kind made by muppets who are trying to replicate Annihilation. Conceptually this is the same film as Annihilation; an object from space causes distortions in time and biological mutations that impact a character dealing with cancer fallout. But whilst Annihilation achieves a quite glorious sense of dread, doom and unknowable, Color only manages slapsticky pastiche. Annihilation provides epic, fractalised mutations of plants, animals and humans in a literal Rorschach inkblot test of evolutionary biology. Color does a bulk buy of pink plastic flowers from the dollar shop and slops together some skinned sheep heads.
If you want Lovecraftian/cosmic horror, allow me to recommend Annihilation, The Endless and even Cure for Wellness and Arrival.
If you like to double check the line of "so bad it's good", or if you're a fan of Richard Stanley or Lovecraft, then sure, give this go. I put it in the "so bad it's just bad" category, but everyone is different.
J* gives it 1 star.
PS. My partner's review was "You know what, it's still a crap movie, but I liked Island of Doctor Moreau a lot more." And if you've never seen it, or the doco explaining Richard Stanley's firing from the project, Lost Souls, check it out. Honestly, Island might still be a hot mess, but if Stanley had stayed on I bet it would have been a lot worse.
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j* movie reviews 2020
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