"Color Out of Space" will play the ShowRoom Cinema, 707 Cookman Ave., Asbury Park, Friday, Feb. 14 through Thursday, Feb. 20. For showtimes, tickets and more information, visit showroomcinemas.com/asburypark.

Strange days have found us.

The first wild cinematic ride of 2020 has arrived, and it's a doozy: "Color Out of Space," now playing in select cinemas, combines the talents of mercilessly inventive actor Nicolas Cage and cult favorite South African auteur Richard Stanley, returning behind the camera for his first narrative feature film in more than 25 years.

Together, Cage and Stanley are adapting a landmark 1927 novella by controversial author H.P. Lovecraft. The film co-stars Tommy Chong.

Like we said, this is a wild ride.

Cage stars as a New England family man whose family is beset by an escalating array of horrors after a meteorite crash lands on their front lawn.

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What begins as a relatively subdued domestic familial pyschodrama rife with the tension of rural living eventually descends into a psychedelic sci-fi horror show that manages to be at once both genuinely disturbing and quite captivating.

The film, co-written by Stanley and Scarlett Amaris, takes a while to get going; what feels like the film's first act runs an hour or so, more than half of the running time.

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But once "Color" shifts gears, it transforms into something really special. No actor cuts loose with aplomb quite like Cage, and here he continues his tradition established with his previous SpectreVision freak-out, 2018's "Mandy," of singularly realized depictions of unhinged men driven to screaming, grief-stricken violence.

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The film's back end ought to be a delight for fans of gross-out creature features of the 1980s. Stanley and director of photography Steve Annis craft a vivid, at-times hauntingly beautiful world of grotesque invention that recalls the films of frequent Lovecraft cinematic adapter Stuart Gordon and John Carpenter, a noted fan of the author's works.

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Overall, this is a blissfully strange film and a bold statement by a filmmaker who has been out of the limelight for far too long.

In a recent interview with the Hollywood Reporter, Stanley confirmed that "Color Out of Space" is his first in a planned trilogy of Lovecraft adaptations. We're crossing our fingers that the two subsequent films come to pass, and that it doesn't take another couple of decades for them to happen.

Richard Stanley's "Color Out of Space," an RLJE Films release, is now playing in select cinemas, 110 minutes, not rated.