Bounding Into Halloween Night 9: ‘Color Out Of Space’ & ‘Invasion Of The Body Snatchers’
Of all the amazing subgenres in the fear category, I’d have to say that “Cosmic Horror” is my all-time favorite. There is nothing more frightening than the idea that anything can be out there in the incomprehensibly vast space that lies beyond our small world. How our minds are so limited, and so easily breakable when in the presence of something beyond its three-dimensional capacity.
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That something can come along and open new vistas of reality which will either drive us mad from the revelation, or cause us to flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age while the universe watches with cold indifference.
These two movies bring the terror from above, but not with reptilian authoritarianism, or by blowing up the White House, but discreetly. Because they can’t acclimate (or attempt to) by making a loud entrance. Here is an adaptation of a classic story, and a classic that’s the remake of a classic. Let the invasion begin!
Color Out of Space (2020)
“It was just a colour 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,” HP Lovecraft once wrote. That’s pretty much how the immortal father of this subgenre described all of his Eldritch monstrosities.
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An ancient, indescribable being that’s from beyond the eons, and it usually has an unpronounceable name. Howard Phillips Lovecraft was a brilliantly troubled shut-in (with a genetic predisposition to madness) who wrote short stories, and novellas that were published between 1916 to 1936 in classic magazines such as Weird Tales. His philosophy was that there is no God, or any kind of benevolent presence in the universe, and people are not significant whatsoever in the grand scheme of intergalactic existence.
All his characters turn up missing, dead, and/or insane. He didn’t believe in the whole “And they all happily ever after” nonsense, nor did he pull any punches. This movie is adapted from his story of the same name (but he spells “Color” as “Colour”), and it’s still one of his best. Richard Stanley (Hardware, Dust Devil) is the fourth director to adapt this story into film, but luckily for him the bar was set incredibly low. Now, let’s meet the Gardners!
Nathan (played by Nicolas “Captain Crazy” Cage) decides to move his family out to his late father’s farm in the boonies west of the fictional witch city of Arkham, Massachusetts after his wife, Theresa (Joely Richardson), undergoes a mastectomy to remove her cancer. While she attempts to get back on the ball with her career, Nathan decides to start boarding alpacas in the hopes of them being the next big thing in agriculture.
This leaves their oldest son Benny (Brendin Mayer), the middle wiccan daughter Lavinia (Madeline Arthur), and the youngest Jack (Julian Hilliard) with no other choice to adapt to their new environment. The Gardners also took in a hippie vagrant (played by Tommy Chong, maaaan!) who lives in their private patch of woods.
One night, a meteor crashes in their front yard. It emits a brightly colored glow that puzzles the family (and scares the crap out of Jack) before the nighttime darkness returns. They awake the next morning to find a hydrologist surveying the land for a dam development, and he tells the Gardners to not drink the damn water from their well after he tests it and the results come back abnormal to say the least. Do they listen? Of course not! The alien life starts to spread to the plant life, and mutating it. Then it gets to the animals, and it’s pretty obvious what “the color” mutates next.
As far as having a great time at the movies goes, this one has the total package. Cosmic Horror, Body Horror, graphic violence, disturbing images, and Nicolas Cage losing more and more of his s–t as the movie progresses. You don’t need to be hanging with Chong in the green (and with the green) to tweak over the trippiness of the psychedelic freakout that is Color Out of Space.
Gross and weird are two reasonable words to describe the direction this movie goes, but it builds to an ending that’s as Lovecraftian as it gets. Get a little Color over on Prime… But first, peep the trailer:
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)
We go from one amorphous parasitic alien species that’s hellbent on using our planet as it’s own personal breeding ground to another with the acclaimed 1978 opus, Invasion of the Body Snatchers from director Philip Kaufman.
It’s a remake of the 1955 film of the same name which itself was the first adaptation of novel The Body Snatchers by Jack Finney. Just like the last movie, this one has been “updated” multiple times throughout the years, but that seems to fit their shared theme of imitate and duplicate… Bring in the Pod People!
An alien lifeform made up of jelly spores abandons its dying planet after draining all of its resources, and finds a way to escape by defying gravity. It slowly drifts through space with no set destination until finally reaching our planet, and enters our atmosphere, but then it gets swept into an even bigger apocalyptic hellhole than the husk of a world it left behind.
The streets of San Francisco welcomed its new visitor with heavy rain, and poor creature quickly adapted by blending in with what lingering fauna remains there and taking the shape of small pods with a pink flower in the middle. It’s just in time for health department scientist, Elizabeth (Brooke Adams), to stumble across one of the pods, and takes it home where she lives with her boyfriend, Geoffrey (Art Hindle).
She’s unable to find it in any of her books, and writes it off as some weird, new crossbreed. The couple go to bed, and that’s when the pod wakes up. Elizabeth lets it float to the back of her mind, but starts to notice Geoffrey is acting strange – cold, distant, blank, and almost robotic.
She confides to her coworker, Matthew (the late/great Donald Sutherland), that she suspects him of being an impostor. He brings her to his psychiatrist friend, David (the later/greater Leonard Nimoy). On the way there, a panicked man (the latest/greatest Kevin McCarthy) runs up to Matthew’s car. He pounds on the window while yelling about how, “They’re coming!” “Something terrible!” and “You’re in danger!”- before being struck dead in the street!
They get to Spock (I mean “David”), meet an aspiring writer named Jack (Jeff “Brundle Fly” Goldblum), and things continue to get worse as the group uncovers the terrifying plot to replace humans. It waits until a person sleeps, consumes them, rewrites their DNA, and a mindless alien clones hatches out of a pod nearby, and it becomes part of the shared hivemind.
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They move in groups, and viciously kill anyone who isn’t one of them, but they’re easily fooled if a person pretends to be emotionless, and stone model of blank apathy while in their presence. It’s too bad this didn’t take place in the 1990s, the Goth kids would’ve had the best chance of surviving.
Digressions aside… There aren’t many remakes that reach the same levels of quality as their predecessors, let alone surpass them, but this one does. It’s not just one of the best remakes, but it’s one of the greatest Sci-Fi Horror films of all time.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers is also one of those rare stories where every version is good (even the 1993 remake, Body Snatchers, doesn’t suck!) Regardless of whichever one you choose to watch, there is no wrong choice, but I prefer this one above all, and it’s over on Prime.
Check out (and assimilate with) the trailer:
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