Robert Bierman
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The overall vibe is akin to the Nic Cage movie Vampire’s Kiss ; the one where Cage insisted on eating a real, live cockroach.
In some of the film’s finest moments – like Eddie voraciously devouring a bag of frozen tater tots or leaping into a lobster tank to treat the creatures as his own personal buffet table – Hardy’s performance hearkens back to Nicolas Cage in Vampire’s Kiss , a turn so off-the-wall that it has gained legendary status.
Thankfully, "Ghost Rider" plays a lot of this for comedy -- at least until the special effects budget kicks in -- and Cage lets himself go loosey-goosey in a way he hasn't since, oh, "Vampire's Kiss" way back in 1989 .
Color Out of Space (2020)
Directed by Richard Stanley
influenced by Vampire's Kiss (1989)
Visuals Characters
Stanley equated it a bit to Cage’s memetastic work in Vampire’s Kiss, and he’s not far off.
He not only yells at his kids, but starts to use the voice from Vampire’s Kiss which is how you know he’s full Cage.
Impressively, the film even manages to plot a logical through line for Cage’s performance, which explodes in unpredictable directions as Nathan’s sanity increasingly deteriorates, with the actor’s most manic tics, such as his jerking motions and high-pitched whine, feeling as if they’ve been piped in from 1988’s Vampire’s Kiss .
A slow-burn that announces its heart of madness at the one-hour mark when Cage goes full Vampire's Kiss , Color Out of Space is South African auteur Stanley's triumphant return after years in exile following his legendarily disastrous attempt to direct The Island of Dr .
Days begin to bleed into each other, new plants and bugs begin to appear, the crops grow big and juicy but ultimately rotten on the inside, animals go missing and reappear in misshapen forms and the already eccentric Nicolas Cage is pushed to places he genuinely hasn’t been since the comic mania of Vampire’s Kiss .
It’s all dialled up to eleven, and Stanley isn’t concerned with how disturbing and unsettling it can feel, nor with how insane Cage can get, in what seems like a brilliant reprise of his yuppie character from Vampire’s Kiss.
The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent (2022)
Directed by Tom Gormican
influenced by Vampire's Kiss (1989)
Where Nic sulks over a meeting that ended in a whimper, Nicky is fired up, flipping his floppy hair and wiggling in his leather jacket and yelling the reminder that they are " Nic fuckiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiing Cage! " With some CGI smoothing, Cage is made to look younger, perhaps harkening to the '80s, when he was firing audiences up as the hot-tempered stud of Moonstruck or the voracious creep of Vampire's Kiss.
It’s one thing to eat a cockroach (as he did for Vampire’s Kiss ); it’s a whole other to chew up and spit out your own career with an accepting self-awareness of every criticism levelled at you (“You seem to be working all the time,” his therapist notes) and turn it into a full-blown comedy.
Indeed, his inner id is represented by a digitally de-aged “Vampire’s Kiss”-era Cage who yells, hoots and hollers, and tries to convince our protagonist to give in to his worst impulses.
Part Dwight Frye in "Dracula," part Tasmanian devil, Cage makes the previous champ -- Crispin Glover in "River's Edge" -- look like Perry Como.
This is a next-level work by the veteran actor that recalls his epically hyperbolic performances in classics like Vampire’s Kiss, Wild at Heart, Face/Off and Adaptation.
Think of his blood-drinking executive in Vampire’s Kiss, or his Wild at Heart outlaw, or his tragically flop-sweat-soaked screenwriter in Adaptation.
Panos Cosmatos’ movie about madness is itself quite mad, but it gives Cage the opportunity to deliver his most lunatic turn since “Vampire’s Kiss”—indeed, it rivals what he did in Robert Bierman’s 1989 camp classic, without quite equaling it.
This Panos Cosmatos film rescues Cage from his paycheck gigs in direct-to-video releases but suggests that his willingness to do them is tied inextricably to the more respected actor that he used to be: that his award-winning past and IRS-indebted present are not two sides of the same coin but the same side, because Cage is always willing to push things way further than other actors, and that’s how you end up with a résumé that includes Vampire’s Kiss , Leaving Las Vegas , THE BEES, and a 2016 movie you didn’t even know about where Nicolas Cage accepts orders from God (Russell Brand) to hunt Osama bin Laden.