Willy's Wonderland (USA 2021: Dir Kevin Lewis)

These days if you're going to watch a movie with Nicolas Cage in the cast, a lot of your enjoyment of that film is going to be based on the extent to which you like Mr C, so front and centred is he in the roles he lands these days. In Willy's Wonderland the actor originally born Nicolas Kim Coppola is 'The Janitor', an almost dialogue free part which allows him to regularly kick arse and chug beer, unhampered by the kind of dialogue which can be his undoing.

Cage is a a drifter, who swings into the little town of Hayesville in his flash car; or more accurately comes a cropper when his tyres are blown out by a stinger laid across the road. The local garage can fix the vehicle but it'll cost him $1000, bills only; no cards, no internet in Hayesville. Cash strapped Cage is offered a deal; if he'll stay overnight and help clean up 'Willy's Wonderland' all debts will be considered settled and he can drive away on four brand new radials. Hey, he even gets a company T shirt.

'Willy's Wonderland' is a shut down restaurant with animatronic animals to delight the kids. Only it doesn't have such a great reputation in town, evidenced by the graffiti on the walls which reads 'Gateway to Hell' and 'Kid Killers'; it's also maybe why perky teen Liv (Emily Tosta) is trying to set fire to it; that is until she's escorted off the premises and taken home to her foster mother, who just happens to be the town sheriff (Beth Grant). 

So Cage, now living up to his 'Janitor' title, settles into the 'Wonderland' building and begins the cleanup. It seems that the operation was shut down following a couple of lawsuits being served on the owner, Tex Macadoo (Ric Reitz) because of injuries to kids by the automatons. Cage quickly finds out that the machines do indeed have a life of their own; one of them, Ozzie the Ostrich, attacks our hero but ends up with its head bashed in and its mechanical guts pulled out, courtesy of the 'Janitor.'

Liv's friends release her from incarceration and accompany her back to the restaurant so she can finish the incendiary deed. Unsurprisingly they fall through the roof and end up, via the soft play area, in the heat of the action. It's just them and the Janitor versus a horde of marauding life sized mechanical animals in a fight to the death.

There is of course a reason behind the rampaging auto-beasts, involving serial killers and black magic, but we don't really care about that; we're here to see Nicolas Cage, with nary a sneer in sight, silently take out the automatons, fuelled only by his bare hands and craft beer. The fact that he's an effective kick arse machine, while the ineffective young people - with the exception of Liv - become victims of Willy the Weasel, Tito Turtle and the rest is interesting. Early on in the movie, where the origin of the mechanical menagerie is discussed, Liv describes the original owner of 'Willy's Wonderland' as "one of the last century's most sick and sadistic serial killers." Wait a minute, last century? Ouch; way to make a viewer feel old. And yet it's the old fart (Cage) who's the hero of the day! Go figure.

Anyhow, as mentioned this is Cage's movie. A silent hero who also finds time to buff his nails and both resurrect and get in some serious leisure time on a pinball machine, he's way less annoying than some of his other recent cinematic incarnations (Red Miller, I'm looking at you). This bizarre little movie plunders, in no particular order, Meet the Feebles (1989) and a couple of recent reboots from 2019, Lars Klevberg's Child's Play and The Banana Splits Movie by Daniella Esterhazy. As those influences suggest it's a film best seen with a crowd and while it's a lot of fun, it misses opportunities to send up commercialism and/or or small town politics which would give it a bit of an extra dimension. Great soundtrack by Émoi though with a really earwormy theme.

LFF 2019: Color Out of Space (Portugal/USA 2019: Dir Richard Stanley)

The Gardner family live in a house in the middle of a dense area of New England woods (the fictional Arkham, Massachusetts, but actually shot in Portugal), an hour from the nearest anything. Dad Nathan (Nicolas Cage) is a slacker guy with a taste for bourbon, mum Theresa (Joely Richardson) is recovering from breast cancer and, it is strongly suggested, a double mastectomy. Daughter Lavinia (Madeleine Arthur), whose name is none more Lovecraftian, has goth tendencies and a copy of 'Necronomicon' is never far from her side. Her stoner brother Benny (Brendan Meyer) and younger sibling Jack (Julian Hilliard) complete the family, who are all clearly struggling in the wake of mum's illness.

Lavinia meets hydrologist Ward Philips (Elliott Kinght), completete with Miskatonic University T shirt - one of a number of none too subtle Lovecraft nods in the film - who's in town to check out the local water supply, which he thinks may have become contaminated. The arrival of a pink, glowing meteorite crash landing in their garden triggers a series of events which, to put it mildly, further destabilise a family that were just holding it together in the first place. The colour exuding from the fallen rock slowly transforms everything in the vicinity, from the increasingly otherworldly flora to the fauna: starting with bizarre insect life (which reminded me of the weird flying things in Frank Darabont's Lovecraftesque adaptation of the Stephen King story, 2007's The Mist), the meteorite's colour activates full on mutations while also distorting space and time. And through it all the Gardners struggle to hold it together as an alien presence uses their back garden as a potential centre for world domination and monster curation.

Color Out of Space was created by Elijah Wood's SpectreVision production team, who previously brought you 2018's Mandy. The movie shares some similarities with the company's last outing, not least the purple/vermillion tonal palette and of course Mr Cage, who - and this is a relative term obviously - dials down his performance as troubled family man Nathan. He still acts like he's strayed in from another film, exacerbated by the rest of the cast playing it rather straight (if a mum and son Thing like flesh-hybrid could be considered 'straight'). Whether sensuously hand milking his family of alpacas, or cosying up to yet another glass of bourbon when the going gets tough, it's hard to imagine anyone else taking on the role of Nathan.

But let's hear it for the effects here, which complement the general WTFery of the piece with some of the best practical makeup and set pieces I've seen since John Carpenter's The Thing reboot back in 1982. There's a definite celebration of 1980s animatronics going on, with some staggeringly well done set pieces; and a scene in the family's barn lovingly and horrifyingly homages the same setup in Daniel Haller's 1965 'The Colour out of Space' adaptation Die Monster Die! (aka Monster of Terror).

As an exercise in woozy terror Color Out of Space works in places. As a piece about the breakdown of the family I'm not so sure: and as a Lovecraft adaptation it's best seen as a sort of misfiring labour of love. In the Q&A after the movie the director mentioned that the introduction of younger people and indeed a person of colour (the Ward Phillips character) into the story was deliberately done because these were types not to be found in Lovecraft's writing. But this type of attempt to bring the author's work up to date just made me think that he remains pretty much unfilmable. So much of Color Out of Space is jumbled and uneven - what was that whole Lavinia witchcraft subplot about? - and some great special effects can't disguise a general air of cheesiness which renders the movie rather unsatisfactory. There's no doubting Stanley's intentions here, and there are moments in the film which remind you that he can be a very creative director, but ultimately it's just a bigger budget and way too long B movie.

Mandy (USA 2018: Dir Panos Kosmatos)

Panos Kosmatos's belated follow up to 2010's  Beyond the Black Rainbow is a self consciously 'out there' film so in love with its own otherness it forgets to be interesting. Mandy wants to be immersive and shocking, but it's so lacking in wit and wisdom that it becomes one long (very long) slog to the finish line. Yeah, I didn't like it.

Nicolas Cage is Red Miller, a lumberjack with a dark past living in a possibly mythic location called The Shadow Mountains, who seems finally to have found happiness in artist Mandy (Andrea Riseborough). The scars on Mandy's face also suggest she has a story to tell.

The pair spend nights in bed talking about the planets and the cosmos, but their idyllic state is severely compromised when cult leader and ex-singer Jeremiah Sand - boss of a Manson-like group called Children of the New Dawn - takes a shine to Red's girlfriend. Sand orders Mandy's capture by a Cenobite-like biker gang called the Black Skulls, and after Sand fails to seduce her by playing some of his music and stripping naked in front of her (triggering much mirth from Ms Riseborough) she is murdered. Red, racked with an almost psychotic remorse, vows revenge on Mandy's killers leading to an LSD fueled gory fight to the death.

I should have found Mandy fun. I should have found it a romp. I didn't. It feels like a film that's just trying too hard to be esoteric, and while some scenes had a certain appeal - a chainsaw fight, the 'cheddar goblin' fake advert, the hallucinatory face swapping scene between Jeremiah and Mandy - for the most part it's just too overloaded to be enjoyable, even down to Jóhann Jóhannsson’s unsubtle score.

On the plus side, Kosmatos's overwrought dialogue, design and content is at least perfect for Cage's hyper-kinetic performance. It's the same shtick he's deployed in a dozen other movies, but in Mandy it's just one more over the top thing in a film whose business is excess. A sequence where Miller, grieving the loss of his girlfriend while intermittently swigging vodka, dousing his wounds and primally screaming on the toilet, would in most other movies be worthy of note. Here it's just another scene. Andrea Riseborough seems rather wasted in the role of Mandy, although several closeups of her face, her huge eyes staring impassively but rather creepily, make it obvious why she was cast (it's also good to see her in a role where she isn't heavily disguised).

Yes it looks good - well good's probably the wrong word - it looks hellish; and you'll enjoy the colour palette if you like the colour red, in what I'm guessing is a nod to Argento.

But really, so bloody what? Maybe I need to see this again (unlikely), but its charms were totally lost on me, and I left the cinema rather annoyed at the vacuity I had just witnessed.