Nic Cage Has Met His Crazy Match In The New Lovecraft Movie
The Color Out Of The Sky could be wall-to-wall insanity -- and disproportionately little of that has to do with starring Nic Cage.
The trouble with stories about planet-sized horrors so terrible that they turn people's minds into Salvador Dali paintings just by glancing at them is that it's kinda hard to adapt that into a visual medium. Which might be why so few filmmakers have (unsuccessfully) dared to make movies about the works of H.P. Lovecraft. But an upcoming one has already gotten off to a great insane start by casting Nicolas Cage, which has led to something once thought impossible: Cage might not be the weirdest thing in a movie.
After a decade of starring in bad B-movies, Cage has recently completely reinvented himself by starring in a good B-movie called Mandy.
Now, the actor has again teamed up with Mandy's producers to star in an adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft's The Color Out Of Space. The short story tells of an out-of-town surveyor who investigates a strange vessel that has crashed into a farming community and out of which seeps an incomprehensibly alien color that turns both the farmers and the very land itself insane. They haven't announced Cage's role, but given his performance history and the available characters, our money's on him playing the color.
But it's not Cage's craziness that will decide the fate of this inherently unhinged movie. That honor will likely go to its director, Richard Stanley. If you haven't heard of Stanley, that's because for the last 20 years, he's been less of a director and more of a mad hermit.
Stanley rose to fame in 1990 with the actual '80s indie horror Hardware, but then lost his mind trying to make The Island Of Dr. Moreau, one of the most disastrous and demented film productions in the history of Hollywood. Not only was he overwhelmed dealing with a hostile land and animals, but he also had to contend with perhaps the two most terrifyingly diva actors of all time: a decrepit Marlon Brando, who had decided to outdo his weird openly pissing himself phase by insisting he should wear an ice bucket for a hat and have a dwarf actor as his pet, and a young Val Kilmer, who was such an unreasonable bully that he got Stanley fired when the director refused to build him a massive treehouse for no reason whatsoever.
New Line cinemaThe only man who could've played a Lovecraftian horror without any CGI.
The experience clearly broke Stanley, who spent months roaming the Australian wilderness and occasionally sneaking back on set dressed as a bulldog/man hybrid mutant. Since then, he hasn't made a single feature film, only a handful of documentaries and strange shorts, only now to return to try the epic task of tackling a Lovecraft adaptation. Then again, as a filmmaker who has gazed into the Hollywood abyss and had it gaze back, he might just be the kind of scarred maniac to not only evoke actual Lovecraftian lunacy, but also deal with the ultimate crazy festering inside Nicolas Cage. Or that insanity will eat him. Or both.
So to recap: The Color Out Of Space will be a movie based on a mad story by a mad writer directed by a mad director and starring the Norse god of mischief himself. So at least mediocrity is off the table. We're going to call it now that The Color Out Of Space will be either the greatest movie ever made or the worst. So not really different from any other Nic Cage vehicle after all.
For more weird tangents and his personal recipes for toilet wine, do follow Cedric on Twitter.
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