Taika Waititi’s Jojo Rabbit, Todd Phillips’ Joker, and Rian Johnson’s Knives Out are reason enough to be excited about this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, but the announcement of the festival’s Midnight Madness participants should draw even the snooziest film buffs from their comfy beds. Leading the pack is the world premiere of Color Out Of Space, the first non-documentary feature from Hardware director Richard Stanley—the subject of the great Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey Of Richard Stanley’s The Island Of Dr. Moreau—in more than 20 years. Better yet? It’s an H.P. Lovecraft adaptation starring Nicolas Cage. Below find a partial list of some of the projects we’re looking forward to catching.
Color Out Of Space
Joely Richardson and Tommy fuckin’ Chong star alongside Cage in Stanley’s adaptation, which is described as “a cosmic nightmare about Nathan Gardner (Cage) and his family, whose recent retreat to rural life is quickly disrupted by a meteorite that crashes in their front yard.” An extraterrestrial parasite then turns the farm into a “hallucinatory prison,” and we couldn’t possibly be more excited.
Blood Quantum
Canadian filmmaker Jeff Barnaby, whose feature Rhymes for Young Ghouls premiered at the 2013 festival, returns to TIFF with Blood Quantum, a zombie flick about an isolated Mi’gmaq community that finds themselves immune to the plague. “Do they offer refuge to the denizens outside their reserve or not?” asks a press release. Good question.
First Love
The latest from prolific Japanese filmmaker Takashi Miike (Audition, Ichi The Killer) follows “a doomed boxer and a haunted drug addict” who stumble their way into a feud between warring gangs. What makes the boxer doomed? What makes the drug addict haunted? We have questions!
The Twentieth Century
Matthew Rankin, whose short films have been lighting up Canadian cinema for the last several years, makes his feature debut with The Twentieth Century, a “bizarro biopic of William Lyon Mackenzie King.” King, who served as Prime Minister of Canada throughout the Second World War, was apparently an “awkward” man with a weird Hitler obsession. Rankin’s film is said to reimagine his early life “as a series of abject humiliations, both professional and sexual.” Okay, then.
And that’s just the beginning. See the complete list of films over at TIFF’s website.
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It’s high time Richard Stanley returned to feature filmmaking. “Dust Devil” is a criminally underappreciated flick.
Especially the Final Cut Stanley managed to put together. Holy moly did Miramax ever butcher that flick.
Holy shit, is Hardware an under-appreciated film.
Shame it was such a completely unrepentant and blatent rip-off of the strip Shok! from the comic 2000 AD, but at least the judge found in the publisher’s favour in the plagiarism case.
That was such a weird thing to do, because it wasn’t even so much a rip-off of some general ideas or plots as it was a straight up adaptation without permission. And 2000AD was basically an institution in the UK, its not like it was some tiny indie book where they could hope no one had ever heard of it. At least no one tried to claim the plagiarism was some kind of artistic statement (yes I am still salty about Shia Lebeouf adapting a Daniel Clowes comic to film and claiming he wrote it)
If you compare frames from the pic and the comic it’s virtually a storyboard. I had to cover the court case and the producers had to play Fleetway Publications a hefty, undisclosed sum and add a credit on all prints and video versions. I’ve met Stanley a couple of times and he’s the sort of arrogant little shit who believed he’d get away with it.
If Color Out of Space is 1/2 as good as Mandy… let’s just say I am freaking out! Will we finally have a great Lovecraft adaptation?
The silent film version of The Call of Cthulhu is a genuinely great Lovecraft adaptation, to me
H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society also produced The Whisperer from Darkness a few years back, and it’s also great. Unlike The CoC, it expands from the original story somewhat, but still retains most of its spirit. And while Cthulhu was made in the style of 1920’s silent film, Whisperer was made in the style of 1950’s pulp scifi.
Yeah I still need to watch their Whisperer in Darkness, which also sounds great
Like Mandy, Color out of Space is being produced by Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah’s production company SpectreVision, so there’s reason to be optimistic.
Die Farbe is an excellent adaptation of “The Colour Out of Space.” Like the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society films mentioned in other posts, it’s in black and white to fit the period, plus that black and white is used very cleverly as it relates to the title. It’s German, and if you have Amazon Prime, it’s included under the title The Color Out of Space.
It’s the story that shows that Lovecraft was as terrified of the electromagnetic spectrum as much as he was terrified of air conditioners.
Don’t forget the hideous racism, too. “The Horror of Red Hook” is near-Fox level screaming white panic.
Lovecraft was too crazy to even speak to people. A bit of insight to all the housebound seniors who are all over Trump’s mushroom.
My biggest concern with Stanley’s “Color out of space” was that the producers would get tired of his weirdness, fire him, ban him from the set, hire Ron Howard to complete the film while Stanley “disguises” himself as a cultist and makes a documentary based upon Stanley’s clandestinely filmed cell-phone videos.
I will be even more eager to see this movie if someone can assure me that at some point in the movie, Cage will yell “Die, Monster, die!”
Will someone have an epic mustache and turtleneck combo? Will the ending be about half of the film??? That would be a horror indeed!
I always prefer to think that pic of Cage isn’t from Mandy, it’s just him getting up any average morning.
Nah, for that, we need the ‘vodka on the toilet and screaming’ screengrab.
Maybe he has onesie pjs for that, something like-
I’m already disappointed that they appear to have modernized “The Color out of Space”, but I’ll delay judgement until I see it. First Lovecraft I ever read, and crept under my skins like a disease. I remember finishing it and think “huh, that wasn’t that scary” and then waking in the middle of the night terrified.
To be fair, there isn’t really anything about the story that needs to be tied to a specific era. Any rural setting in any time period works just fine for the story.
But why add the trope of mysterious things happening after the family moves to a new place? The fact that Gardner is already established in the local area is important. He has not “recently retreated to rural life”.
I’m guessing it’s so that it’s easier to cut out the narrator as a framing device. Keep in mind, the original story was written from the point of view of someone who was not familiar with the area and had to be explained quite a lot as he interviewed the people involved. Having such a narrator would be redundant in a visual medium, so the setting has to be explained to the characters experiencing the events, instead.
Color Out of Space
….is it red? I bet it’s red
Color Out of Space
….is it red? I bet it’s red