Don't Drink the Water

Films: Color Out of Space
Format: DVD from Sycamore Public Library on basement television.

It’s rare when I see something based on a story or book that I know. Most of my reading tends to be non-fiction these days. Color Out of Space is based on the H.P. Lovecraft short story The Colour Out of Space, a story that clearly influenced a film like Annihilation as much as that film was influenced by Stalker. It might be too much to suggest that any movie that starts with a meteor is influenced by Lovecraft’s story, but there are echoes of it in a movie like Slither as well as the second story in the original Creepshow.

This isn’t the first version of the story filmed. There was a version produced about a decade ago as well as one from the late ‘80s starring Claude Aikens and Wil Wheaton (called The Curse). That version is a great deal more accurate to the original story than this one, but it also suffers from having been made in a year when there weren’t really effects that could do the story justice.

Off Script: Hardware

Film: Hardware
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on laptop.

Budget science fiction from the 1980s and early 1990s is always interesting to me. In the case of Hardware, we have an interesting premise that suffers from some significant issues. The first issue is the $1.5 million budget for a film that has a great deal of ambition. Particularly for a film that wants to show off a post-apocalyptic wasteland, the budget just wasn’t there. A bigger issue is that the plot has holes big enough to drive a train through. I can live with the small budget. The bigger issue is that this really needed to spend another couple of weeks in rewrites.

We’re thrust into a post-apocalyptic world where, at least for the first few minutes, everything is red. A scavenger finds what looks to be a robot of some type, but he is unaware that the robot was moving slightly before its discovery. He picks it up and drags it back to what passes for civilization where he sells it to Moses “Hard Mo” Baxter (Dylan McDermott). Mo keeps the head of the robot and sells the rest as scrap to Alvy (Mark Northover). He gives the head to Jill (Stacey Travis), his reclusive artist girlfriend, who incorporates the head into a piece of art.