THE DOOM GENERATION (1995)

"The world sucks."

Two attractive twenty-something year old teenage lovers (Blue and White) accidentally pick up a third attractive twenty-something year old teenager (Red) in their crappy old car and then set out on an aimless road trip around Los Angeles. Occasionally stopping along the way for some good ol’ American robbery, dismemberment and cock mutilation. Sounds cool, but it’s nowhere near as exciting as you would imagine. Not even close. Oh yeah, you did catch on that the three main characters, Red White and Blue, all have names that coincide with the colours of the American flag, right? Okay, cool. Just making sure. Cuz man…that’s fucking deep.

Featuring a cameo by Heidi Fleiss (among other forgotten celebrities), a joke about "Richard Gere's butthole", a Ministry shirt and music by everybody from Nine Inch Nails to MC 900 Ft Jesus, THE DOOM GENERATION is definitely a product of its times. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing, but it is an interesting historical (and low budget) look back to the mid-1990’s America.

I remember seeing THE DOOM GENERATION when it first came out on home video (probably 1996) and being disappointed that it paled to NATURAL BORN KILLERS. Revisiting it now, the whole thing just looks cheap.  And the dialogue is cringier than I remember. Also, the whole gay thing (two dudes) is so lightweight that is almost doesn’t exist. Lame.  And the ending sucked.

Worth watching if you’re curious and / or interested in 1990’s independent cinema. Others would probably just find it boring. Writer, Director, Editor and Producer Gregg Araki would later go on to make the devastating MYSTERIOUS SKIN in 2004.

COLOR OUT OF SPACE (2019)

"Maggot dick."

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.