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(Release Info London schedule; February 28th, 2020, Prince Charles Cinema, 7 Leicester Pl, London WC2H 7BY, United Kingdom, 3.25pm ● 8.45pm)
https://princecharlescinema.com/PrinceCharlesCinema.dll/WhatsOn?f=15887572
"Color Out Of Space"
After a meteorite lands in the front yard of their farmstead, Nathan Gardner (Nicolas Cage) and his family find themselves battling a mutant extraterrestrial organism as it infects their minds and bodies, transforming their quiet rural life into a technicolor nightmare.
"Color Out Of Space" is a cosmic nightmare about Nathan Gardner and his family, whose recent retreat to rural life is quickly disrupted by a meteorite that crashes in their front yard. 'The Gardners' peaceful escape quickly becomes a hallucinatory prison, as an extraterrestrial organism contaminates the farmstead, infecting everything and everyone it can. 'The Gardners' are a family who moves to a remote farmstead in rural 'New England' to escape the hustle of 'The 21st Century'. They're busy adapting to their new life when a meteorite crashes into their front yard. The mysterious aerolite seems to melt into the earth, infecting both the land and the properties of space-time with a strange, otherworldly color. A meteorite crashes near 'The Gardners’ Farm', releasing an alien organism that will turn the family’s quiet rural life into a colorful and hallucinogenic nightmare. Nathan, Theresa (Joely Richardson), and their three children Lavina (Madeleine Arthur), Jack (Julian Hillard) and Benny (Brendan Meyer) start to notice strange occurrences after one night when an earth-shaking event deposits a strange object in their front yard.
The mysterious aerolite seems to melt into the earth, infecting both the land and the properties of space-time. The object soon sinks into the earth and that's when the incidences escalate, animals and people acting very oddly. Soon, the place is overrun by the shadows. Mutant forms of technicolor flora start sprouting, while local animals begin to display bizarre deformities. Death stalks the town, madness reigns, and it starts to look like the rest of the world might follow. To their horror, 'The Gardner Family' discover that this alien force is gradually mutating every life form that it touches; including them. Soon, 'The Gardners' realize that they too are susceptible to the extraterrestrial pathogen, and must escape the contagious cloud that has consumed their farm. With the help of friendly hydrologist Ward Phillips (Elliot Knight) and eccentric neighbor Ezra (Tommy Chong), the family attempts to battle a nebulous entity that they can barely begin to understand. What chance can a few humans have against a force capable of traversing the gulf between worlds, a nightmarish being that exists beyond the limits of the human spectrum?
The rural tales are queer. They might be even queerer if city men and college chemists could be interested enough to analyze the water from that disused well, or the grey dust that no wind seems to disperse. Botanists, too, ought to study the stunted flora on the borders of that spot, for they might shed light on the country notion that the blight is spreading, little by little, perhaps an inch a year. The color of the neighboring herbage is not quite right in the spring, and that wild things leave queer prints in the light winter snow. Snow never seems quite so heavy on the blasted heath as it's elsewhere. Horses grow skittish in the silent valley; and hunters cannot depend on their dogs too near the splotch of grayish dust. The mental influences are very bad, too; numbers went queer in the years after Nathan’s taking, and always they lacked the power to get away. Then the stronger; minded folk all left the region, and only the foreigners tried to live in the crumbling old homesteads. They could not stay, though; and one sometimes wonders what insight beyond ours their wild, weird stories of whispered magic have given them. Their dreams at night, they protest, are very horrible in that grotesque country; and surely the very look of the dark realm is enough to stir a morbid fancy.
What it's, only God knows. In terms of matter we suppose the thing Nathan describes would be called a gas, but this gas obeyed the laws that are not of our cosmos. This is no fruit of such worlds and suns as shine on the telescopes and photographic plates of our observatories. This is no breath from the skies whose motions and dimensions our astronomers measure or deem too vast to measure. It's just a color out of space; a frightful messenger from unformed realms of infinity beyond all 'Nature' as we know it; from realms whose mere existence stuns the brain and numbs us with the black extra; cosmic gulfs it throws open before our frenzied eyes. But whatever demon hatchling is there, it must be tethered to something or else it would quickly spread. It fastenes to the roots of those trees that claw the air? One of the current Arkham tales is about fat oaks that shine and move as they ought not to do at night.
H.P. Lovecraft's short story, 'The Colour Out Of Space', was published in 'Amazing Stories' in September 1927, making it a 'Public Domain' work in Europe. 'The Colour Out of Space' is a first-person narrative written from the perspective of an unnamed surveyor from Boston. In order to prepare for the construction of a new reservoir in Massachusetts, he surveys a rural area that's to be flooded near Lovecraft's fictional town of Arkham. He comes across a mysterious patch of land, an abandoned 5-acre (20,000 m2) farmstead, which is completely devoid of all life. At the centre of the farmstead is an old well. The site fills him with an unnatural sense of dread, and he hurries past it. In the early 1880s, the farm had been productive, run by a Nahum Gardner and his family. Then, one afternoon in June 1882, a large meteorite crashed into the farm, beside the well. It was metallic and contained a substance of an indescribable color that proved toxic. While scientists were never able to tell what or who the meteor contained, it's effects were undeniable; the entire Gardner family was struck by insanity, illness, and worse, whilst the land around them was slowly drained of life.
"Color Out Of Space" follows the disastrous fall out in Arkham after it's struck by a meteorite. One of H.P. Lovecraft’s most emblematic stories now comes to the big screen It's a genuine lineup of fantastic visionaries. That’s a sure-fire recipe for cinematic delight. But what does a colour fallen from the sky look like? How will the monstrous creatures inhabiting the 'Blasted Heath' look? And what about the famous 'Lovecraftian' terror that defies description? It's a ominous and colorful world in which the characters live. The film brings the classic sci-fi story to life with the traditional alien aspects while also bringing it up to date with modern technology. Although numerous H.P. Lovecraft adaptations have been done over the years, it’s easily argued that many of these adaptations have done a disservice to the legacy and memory of the late Lovecraft’s works. Although H.P. Lovecraft has been adapted both directly and indirectly over the years, rarely has there been a faithful adaptation that truly captures the cosmic dread that he was known for.
Many of "Color Out Of Space" predecessors fall into the horror comedy genre, something Lovecraft purists decry is in direct opposition to the complete and utter lack of levity in his work. There’s nothing funny about Lovecraft. He believes that 'The Holy Grail' was a black stone 'Aerolite' that was the fragment of a meteorite that had slammed into earth many, many, years ago which had potentially been the basis of a number of religions. If you rubb them together, you can see how they bled when friction is created between the two stones. It seems like magic, but the film believes that these are merely alien metals that secreted some sort of high-density substance in the iron family. It's a film about a meteorite slamming into a family farm on planet 'Earth' that brings an almost spiritual; like change, for the worse, in this case, to the humans and all life forms that it comes into contact with. 'The Holy Grail' itself may have been a meteorite that changed humanity in so far as it led to the birth of many organized religions that survive to this day. In this moment, the film makes reality appear just as magical as H.P. Lovecraft’s fiction.
