Starring Paul Dorsch, Jürgen Heimüller, Ingo Heise, Michael Kausch, Philipp Jacobs, Olaf Krätke, Marco Leibnitz, Ralf Lichtenberg and Patrick Pierce. Written and directed by Huân Vu. Produced by Jan Roth, Peter Tillisch and Huân Vu for Sphärentor Filmproduktionen.

This adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s 1927 short story ‘The Colour Out of Space’, about the weird effects a meteorite has on local people, animals and plants, switches the tale’s location from the hills near the fictional US town of Arkham over to the Schwäbisch-Fränkischen Forest in Germany.

I like DIE, MONSTER, DIE! (aka MONSTER OF TERROR), which was the colourful, hokey 1965 adaptation of the H.P. Lovecraft story that starred Boris Karloff and Nick Adams. I also dig the Richard Stanley-directed version, COLOR OUT OF SPACE (2019), which featured a scenery-chewing turn from Nic Cage and some mutated alpacas! And, I’m glad to say, this low budget German production (original title DIE FARBE) is also well worth a watch.

THE COLOR OUT OF SPACE/DIE FARBE is a lot more faithful to the story than DIE, MONSTER, DIE! was, but, for me, it is less impactful than the 2019 adaptation, which was unquestionably more in-your-face thanks to its psychedelic cosmic horror and its snatches of THING-style body mutations.

Unlike the 2019 Richard Stanley release, this interpretation, made by German-Vietnamese director Huân Vu, moves at a rather stately pace, which I guess is kind of fitting as Lovecraft’s original stories were not exactly fast-moving yarns. The movie also boasts effective b&w cinematography that helps the production evoke a creepy Lovecraftian mood.

The lack of budget does hinder certain moments, unfortunately, such as the scenes in which we’re meant to believe the pollution from the meteorite has created infected, moving trees, but this mutant woodland is obviously just a series of shots of normal, everyday trees blowing in the wind.

The decision to shoot THE COLOR OUT OF SPACE in black and white helps to clearly highlight the new alien colour when it is featured on-screen, but it’s pretty damn hard to make a purple colour particularly scary (and some of the CGI colour blobs are not that realistic). Even so, this German film has gained many fans who consider this to be the adaptation that best captures the mood of the original story, and I definitely appreciate all the effort that was put into this modestly-budgeted production.