A family (wife, husband, two teenage kids and one younger son) live way out in the fucking woods. One evening, a meteor lands in their front yard. Just a few feet from the well where they get their water. A hydrologist, who just so happens to be wandering by, tells them that the water (which is now oily and icky looking) is contaminated, and that they should stop using it. No shit. They keep drinking it anyway. Morons. As the viewer would expect, drinking deep space meteor piss isn’t healthy for humans. Or llamas.
It’s been a few hundred years since I read H. P. Lovecraft’s original “The Colour Out of Space” short story that was published back in 1927, but I do remember it being creepy and awesome. This 2019 film adaptation was neither creepy nor awesome. Right from the beginning I felt zero connection to the family, other than find them annoying. I wouldn’t care if a giant Slor took a giant Slor shit right in their well, but even worse than annoying characters is the alien invasion stuff starts almost immediately. Very little build-up or character development. Just…BAM! Family, woods, aliens attack.
Zero nudity, zero gore, very little blood, zero sense of self-preservation, annoying dialogue, multiple characters completely leaving the contamination zone and then returning, Tommy Chong as a burnout hippie squatter (how original), zero tension, a house with excessive outdoor lighting (most likely purely for the fact that it would look neat in the wacky alien-vision scenes), disappointing ending.
I went into THE COLOR OUT OF SPACE hoping for an extremely creepy story full of inescapable dread and mind-breaking cosmic horror. Instead, I just got a bleh, PG-13 level, yawn-inducing snoozer. Worth watching, I guess, if you're like super bored, but you’d probably be better off reading one of the hundreds of pulp horror novels with a similar story.
