Color Out Of Space

This review is for the Blu-Ray version of 'The Color Out Of Space (Limited Edition) released by Brink in 2015.First off, for the record I want to say that I am not a big fan of Lovecraft. Therefore I'm qualifying my review by stating that my score will be lower than that of fans of Lovecraft.Please note that the language used in this movie is mostly German and you will need subtitles if you don't speak the language. There are some Americans in the movie who speak English.This movie was made by student film makers in Germany and they have done an excellent job with a low budget. On that basis alone, this movie deserves 5 stars. However, I am rating this on the movie itself and the content in the release.This movie does not follow the story exactly but does follow the original pretty close with most of the plot points. The obvious difference is that Lovecraft's story takes place in New England while this one takes place in Germany. The story of what happens as told by the inn patron follows Lovecraft's story very closely with some small differences.PLOT: The movie opens with a young man of German descent driving through the woods of Germany in search of his father. He meets a couple of construction workers who tell him the road is blocked and the valley he is in is going to be flooded. They direct him through a back road to the town he is looking for. At an Inn he shows a picture of his father but nobody recognizes him. Once he drops an old picture of his father in an American army uniform during WW II one of the patrons recognizes the picture. He is then told the story of what happened in the valley during WW II.A meteor had landed in the valley. A group of scientists came and took samples but the samples would just disappear. In addition the meteorite was shrinking. One day it simply disappeared. Strange things began happening in the valley. A family slowly goes crazy that lives nearby. The trees grow enlarged fruit but it is not edible. The land goes bad and the vegetation crumbles. Eventually a group of soldiers comes through the valley where they take the narrator down to the valley. He relays the strange events that followed. The visitor does not believe the narrator and he believes that he is crazy and leaves in a hurry to go find his father.PERSONAL COMMENTS: I simply am not a fan of H.P. Lovecraft. I have read quite a few of his stories but not most of his stories. I have read enough to form an opinion. I basically read one collection which brought together most of his most famous works along with a few others. Some of the stories I read are 'The Dunwich Horror,' 'Call of Cthulhu, 'Rats in the Walls,' along with 'The Colour Out of Space.'For the most part, I find the stories dull. I understand that they are not written the way a modern horror story is written. They are designed to build a feeling of horror. But I simply don't like the stories. For whatever the reason, I never really feel that horror. I guess it's just the modern world we live in. It feels like all the stories are written in a time period of hundreds of years ago or they feel like they are not in this country although most of the stories are set in New England. The stories just don't grip me and after having read one collection, I have no desire to read anymore. I pushed my way through the first one just to see what all the fuss was about. I am not disparaging anybody who is fan of Lovecraft. It is obvious the stories are very well written. It's just not to my taste.The movie being in German does not bother me. I watch all movies with subtitles anyway even when in English.I don't mind the movie being in black & white either. The only thing I might have done differently is to do the flashback sequences, most of the movie, in black and white and left modern day in color. Depicting the world war two era scenes in black and white is in my opinion a good idea. It also allowed the use of color to be especially effective for the alien being (alien essence?).The color used for the alien's essence is purple but it could have been any color since the color is described as a color that can't be described. Perhaps the directors could have used a color that changes shades or colors for the color?....or a mixed color, sort of like a modern art painting?I am never a fan of movies that use a flashback sequence or start with a scene in the modern world and then go back to a previous time. In this case, despite it being a horror movie, I lost all sense of horror for the person telling the story. What I mean is that if the person telling the story is alive and telling you the story then you know there is no possibility that harm can come to him in the past (unless of course he tells you he has been resurrected from the dead!)RECOMMENDATIONS: I'm giving this release an overall 4 stars. If you were to rate this as a student film then I'd have to give it 5 stars. On that basis it is very well done and if I'm a professor grading this project I'm giving it an A+! If you are a fan of Lovecraft I am giving the plot 4 stars. If you do not like Lovecraft, like myself, then I'm giving the plot 2 to 2 1/2 stars. It gets an average of 3 to 3 1/2 stars. I am boosting it up to 4 stars because there were some good extra's. You get an extra scene and some featurette's along with an insert.

First of all, this is one of the best movies I've seen in the last five years. A couple of others here have reacted pretty much as I have, so I'll simply quote them before I get to my main point: "This black and white film (with "color" where appropriate) has a deep creepiness that keeps you on that proverbial edge of your seat. It is, at times, odd and enigmatic, and definitely looks like it came from the 30's rather than 2012, but it is very effective." And one more, by "Requin,":"I'm a die-hard horror fan and nothing fazes me anymore but I have to say, this movie had me glued to the screen and freaked me out more than once. Extremely effective. Stellar acting. Never mind the subtitles. And the b&w just adds to the Lovecraftian feel. Slow moving but it adds to the suspense."As for my comments, which are all about the other reviews here:First of all, I was struck by the incessant return to Lovecraft-as-author in review after review. "Did a lousy job reproducing Lovecraft," "Did a fine job with translating Lovecraft to film," "Didn't take place in Massachusetts, so I didn't think it was Lovecraftian," "The director doesn't understand/truly understands Lovecraft." Go through a few reviewed movies on Amazon which are based on a famous writer's work: You simply won't find this much obsession with the originating novelist. I try to be sympathetic to Lovecraft lovers. Among my English major students, there were occasionally a few; I tried to respect him as a serious twentieth-century American author. He is authentic and very loyal to his fictional world, he did some things no one else had done (not many, but a few), and he has definitely drawn the attention of a few intelligent readers who have been fairly widely read (like my students). But Lovecraft's readers, as is evidenced abundantly here, are more in the nature of acolytes than discerning readers of literature or watchers-of-movies. I wonder if any of them could stop thinking "This is by Lovecraft, this is by Lovecraft, this is by Lovecraft" over and over throughout the movie.Another recurring motif had to do with the fact the movie was in black and white and that there were subtitles. I was surprised by the unusual number of times these were mentioned in a movie review. It's perfectly okay to dislike b&w foreign films--most of which possess these traits--but I've always thought people who disliked foreign flicks disliked them because the plots were too slow or too talky or too "philosophical." Now I find, to my astonishment, the objection has always been that Truffaut, Goddard, and Antonioni made movies in black and white in a foreign language with subtitles. There just are evidently lots of otherwise intelligent people who have to work too hard to understand a story that isn't in English or in color.The reviews here are very much the sort of post-viewing short-essay commentary that I'd expect if I dragged a bunch of freshmen into an auditorium to watch a movie for Film 101, say "Birth of a Nation." In other words, I'd be making a bunch of people without much knowledge of the breadth of film-making or of literature watch a movie where nobody talks. So how are you supposed to understand it? And you're making them watch a supposed "action" film absent technicolor, CGI, and well-known stars. It's just confusing for them.If only this movie had drawn the attention of its true audience: People who are indifferent to H.P. Lovecraft's authorship of the original story (whether they like Lovecraft as an author or not), people who are used to watching movies that try their damnedest to portray what's going on inside of human beings (nobody of course mentioned our growing understanding of the moral dimensions in the young German protagonist as the film progresses), and people who admire the craftsmanship of a director whose use of German Expressionism is brilliant, thus demonstrating that he's spent a lot of time (a lot of time) looking at other films and knows how creatively to use what he's learned.So I'm going to recommend this movie to lots of my friends (who include everybody from "Fast and Furious" fans to steady watchers of Italian post-war "cinema povera" pictures). And I'm not going to tell them that it's from a story by H.P. Lovecraft, or that it's in black and white, or that it has subtitles. Hopefully, they won't notice as they're being mesmerized by the masterful direction, fine acting, beautiful cinematography, and crisp dialogue of a damned fine movie.

As a young man I read quite a number of H. P. Lovecraft's novels and found them eerie and interesting, even if the writing style was a little dated. Lovecraft dealt in existential horror, the spiritual, moral and physical corruption underlying the seemingly ordinary or the notion that just beyond our cosy illusions of an ordered Cosmos, something incomprehensible and evil lurked, always seeking a way to return. I've also seen a number of film adaptation's and most of them fail simply due to the fact that most of them couldn't rise above the tentacles. This film is a rare exception to this rule. It is eerie and atmospheric and while not perfect, it is an excellent effort. The story is one of a meteorite, containing the eponymous "colour" that first infects a valley with monstrous and inedible growths and then completes it's life cycle before returning to where it came from, having killed everyone and everything that encounters it. I like the arty and understated nature of the film and the fact that it was shot in black and white, with the only colour being that of the unnameable colour of the invader.

A good adaptation of the colour out of space and one of my favoured indie films. I recommend a watch.

Mi aspettavo meglio, molto meglio.Non è facile fare film dalle opere del Solitario di Providence lo sanno tutti. E questo dvd non è che una conferma

Amazing adaptation of Lovecraft's short story, I recommend it to all Lovecraft fans. It has a nice retro feeling to it, much like the silent movie adaptation of The Call of Chtulhu.

Much better then other attemps at fliming Lovercraft's stories.