Back in December, I mentioned that I’d picked up a collection of eight horror movies for five bucks. The recognizable one[1] is the original Night of the Living Dead, so I’m not going to be putting that on. However! There is also Colour from the Dark, a movie which instantly raises the burning question “Did the writers read “Colour out of Space”, or is this a direct rip-off tribute derivative of the very-understandably-forgotten The Curse[2]?”
A family accidentally frees something from the Earth’s womb while drawing water from their well and now a sinister glow is seeping into their lives.
Really, it could be either.
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…okay, that movie was a lot better than I expected. It’s a pretty faithful adaptation of “The Colour out of Space“; set in 1943 Italy, minus the Lovecraft Narrator, plus additional apparently beneficial effects (before the inevitable end result, old injuries and traumas are healed in a couple of characters). The improved crops thing is pretty standard, but this made me think more of Tommyknockers.
Odd sort of disconnect where I find the acting is good, and the characterization is good. The dialogue delivery, on the other hand, is distinctly wooden for a couple of characters, and that can really break the suspension of disbelief for me.
The corruption seems very conscious of the culture it’s in, and very personified; there’s some explicit refutation of Catholicism from the people affected, a couple of times when someone says “I didn’t do X, it was it, the evil thing inside me”. And that honestly seems like a weak point; it left me wondering why it’d bother, why a force that is presented as being of such indifferent power and cancerous effect (even the deliquiescing crosses can be seen as something that happens without the Colour making a point about Christianity) would bother to have people getting stabby.
That really seems like the biggest weak point, though, and it’s not a huge one. Overall, well worth watching.
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[1] There’s usually one that everyone with a passing interest in the genre will have at least heard of on compilation DVDs, and the rest are what I am going to charitably call a grab bag. F’r ex, on the 10-movie Werewolves, Vampires, & Zombies DVD compilation, you have the 1973 The Satanic Rites of Dracula with Christopher Lee. (I don’t think this applies to DVDs with paired movies nearly as well. But you get three or more movies in the DVD case? Ohyes.)
[2] It’s not the most memorable thing about the movie, but I confess that what always first springs to mind about The Curse is the fact that Lucio Fulchi was credited Louis. WTH.
The Color of Space sounds interesting. I’ll check it out. I don’t know what a force would think, but very religious screenwriters, like very religious people in general, often appear to have a somewhat grandiose visions of themselves in this world. To each their own.