I watched the trailer. Apart from the purple slimy meteor and a lone mansion, there aren’t other Maniac Mansion references.
It’s a horror movie. Not my genre, so I can’t say whether is good or bad.
Also, the director Richard Stanley is an occult scholar, and has a really bizarre website dedicated to the secret history of Europe. The website is down now, but still available on Wayback:
This topic reminded me to watch it. It’s nothing like MM. There’s a mansion and a meteorite, that’s it. Resident Evil 7 had more to do with MM than this. Cool movie though.
The Colour Out Of Space movie funnily enough takes a lot of elements from The Dunwhich Horror too (that thing that is secretly fed and grows large hidden in a barn, that´s not in Colour Out Of Space but Dunwhich Horror). Resident Evil 7 like Dunwhich Horror has a hidden relative of the family that grows large and goes on a rampage. But as I´ve said previously especially the first Resident Evil while without a chainsaw like in part 7 has a lot of elements MM has too (A large dining hall table, a grandfather clock, a garden behind the house who have to drain a swimming pool to progress, a hidden secret lab under the mansion etc)
But as Ron Gilbert has stated in the past the whole meteorite thing from MM was inspired by the Jordy Verrril segment from Creepshow which as Stephen King has stated drew influence from The Colour Out Of Space story. So that´s where the connections are.
I liked the visuals a lot and it really had a good atmosphere going on. But everytime he opens his mouth…and he wasn´t even the worst, the acting was just really annoyingly bad for the most part and I´d rather would have watched an old italian movie (that´s really saying something, huh).
However there was a super eerie scene because there was a completly unrelated reference in it.
A character shines through the trees with a flashlight thinking he sees some faint shapes in between. In that scene I randomly thought “this is a bit like one scene in that super creepy story The Willows by Algernon Blackwood”. In that moment that character turns around holding a book in front of his face…now guess what book that was!
Thanks, I was actually wondering about that. The book and the title was obviously exposed for a reason but I didn’t know the reference.
I must say I liked the movie. Nick was overdoing it in the second part but I bought it. I thought he was really good in the subtle parts in the beginning. I liked acting by Chong (Ezra), the rest of them, yeah… But it’s not something that bothered me much. I loved that it had this eerie and psychodelic vibe but the story didn’t fall into pieces (I’d say that’s a big advantage over most old Italian movies, probably all of them! LOL).
