Oh boy what a title... but you know what that means. At least in the world of B-movies and horror. The better the film name.... the weaker the actual release. It's not always true of course but it's certainly the case here in what is part H.P. Lovecraft adaptation and part Roger Corman recycling effort. With the latter being the major proportion of the movie as you might have expected. With the release of Richard Stanley's Color Out of Space it's to be expected that other versions of the tale are taken into consideration. But the results here are pretty rickety and all too familiar to anyone who's seen a story from this period about outsiders coming to visit their girlfriend only to find things have gone awry. Especially when they find an unhinged Boris Karloff living in a creepy old house.
Initially things aren't too shabby at least, and the original story about a meteor landing is used to some extent. There's the uncooperative locals that won't talk about the desolate piece of land up on the heath, and an isolated family dealing with the unexplained problems caused by this event. Stephen (Nick Adams) is an American arriving in this eerie English town to meet his fiancée Susan Witley (Suzan Farmer) and her father Nahum (Boris Karloff). So for a while at least there are some casting choices to enjoy with what feels like a mixture of familiar AIP and Hammer faces. Patrick Magee even gets a minor role as a village doctor, but even he's unwilling to divulge any information about the recent problems.
The issue with this kind of mystery format is that things get pretty frustrating very quickly when everyone is either too stubborn to talk, or in the case of Susan too naive to even question her own father. The suspense often feels forced instead of building naturally, with Stephen's stoic nature only provoking evasive or angry reactions. Nahum has clearly seen something unnatural and watched it take effect on his wife who is bed-ridden, their housekeeper who is missing, and his assistant who has fits of illness. There are screams in the night that everyone ignores and there are weird figures at the windows which nobody investigates seriously. But a whole movie can't be sustained on this sort of intrigue alone, even if the film-makers give it their best shot.
The premise is all too familiar unfortunately, avoiding the cosmic nature of the source material and transplanting it to yet another House of Usher style narrative. When the curtain is pulled back things just get more mystifying as direct references to both radioactive rocks and occult rituals are made. Neither of these inclusions are dealt with in a satisfactory way, as if nobody wanted to commit to one particular genre. Instead it's just all vaguely spooky until the climax when it becomes a kind of monster of the week feature. The family isn't actually cursed, but Nahum refuses to see things in any other light. Stephen is pretty sure about the truth of the matter, but it never becomes a real science fiction parable. It doesn't help that this is all so meandering and slow.
Things do occasionally heat up when knife wielding strangers on the family estate show up, or when Stephen follows Nahum outside to see what is really wrong with his assistant. But in other sequences it's just confusing as the wheelchair bound father can apparently chase his guest around multiple floors of the house (for some reason his personal elevators are edited out until the third act). But despite the strong willed nature of the protagonist things are still drawn out, no thanks to the oblivious Susan and the strangely placid nature of everyone else involved. But without all of these obstructions the arrival of a scientist who can solve all the questions and take Susan away to safety would end the film in about five minutes flat.
There are a handful of interesting moments at least, mainly those surrounding Nahum's greenhouse and what he's got locked away beneath it. For a few minutes it ventures into real 1950s radioactive mutant territory with the added bonus of 1960s coloured lighting. It's not subtle, but the production budget seems to have been spent on a few neat special effects and a handful of weird basement locations. It's silly but still somewhat unsettling, and it's shame that these ideas weren't included during the climax. Instead it just ends with a man in a mask running amok, despite an effective mixture of silver skin and green luminescence. But there's never any real sense this is a Lovecraft-esque tale, and comes off as a slapdash mixture of all of Corman's Poe adaptations and The Invisible Ray.
Ultimately this is the major flaw in a film which wasn't really that original to start with. This is all too often a case of deja-vu and you can see these actors, these ideas, and this production company, in far better examples of this material elsewhere. It's occasionally imaginative, and there are a handful of sinister moments here and there. But they're all too brief and the rest of the story makes a pretty brisk eighty minute running time feel much longer. It just raises a lot of questions about what Nahum's family history really is, or what all the occult props in his house are supposed to be (if they weren't just borrowed from other films). It's not a total failure but this is something for completists only.
2/5
