But from the moment someone loses some fingers carelessly chopping carrots, Stanley reveals this almost Spielbergian dynamic to be something of a ruse: as the toxic alien presence exerts its grip on the surrounding area, both star and film go properly nuts, with Cage subdued one minute and howling at the moon the next and Stanley’s visuals toggling between psychotropic weirdness and outright gore. Apart from the alpacas, it’s a fairly standard alien invasion set-up and Stanley takes care to ground his characters somewhat by having Cage temporarily restrain himself. Nicolas Cage takes the lead as Nathan Gardner, a failed painter turned alpaca farmer, whose livestock and family start exhibiting strange behaviour after a meteor crashes on his land. Working on a more manageable scale (and with a more pliant cast), he returns now with Color Out of Space, a suitably wacko adaptation of the 1927 HP Lovecraft alien invasion-themed short story of same name. The eccentric South African-born filmmaker Richard Stanley achieved infamy in the 1990s when he snuck back onto the set of his Marlon Brando-starring adaptation of The Island of Dr Moreau as an extra after being fired as its director three days into production. Played brilliantly as a kid by Orlando Schwerdt and as an adult by George MacKay (1917), this Ned Kelly isn’t the romanticised, bushy-bearded version portrayed by Heath Ledger in 2003 (or – gulp – the Mick Jagger version from 1970) instead he’s a damaged child, with an emasculated drunk for a father and a manipulative harridan for mother (Essie Davis) whose own talent for needling her first born becomes something that Ned finds increasingly hard to escape as he grows into a wiry, unsure-of-himself outlaw hurtling inescapably towards his fate.
Jumping episodically around Kelly’s life, it provides contextual horrors for his descent into criminality and his defiant rejection of colonial rule, but doesn’t fall into the trap of glorifying or excusing them. Simultaneously interrogating and burnishing the mythology of Australian outlaw Ned Kelly, the film pays tribute to the experimental, rough-hewn, punctuation-free prose style of Carey’s book with an almost wilful disregard for conventional biopic plotting. Following his soulless videogame adaptation Assassin’s Creed, Australian director Justin Kurzel (Snowtown, Macbeth) returns to form with The True History of the Kelly Gang, a punky, violent, pleasingly strange adaptation of Peter Carey’s Booker-winning novel.
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