(WBBM NEWSRADIO) -- In the early-1990s era of VHS cassettes and video rentals, horror film director Richard Stanley made a name for himself with a pair of low-budget wonders before virtually disappearing.
Hardware (1990) was a stylish
Alien-Terminator hybrid about a fragmented killer machine that rebuilds itself. The atmospheric
Dust Devil followed two years later. Next up for Stanley was a Hollywood-backed adaptation of
The Island of Dr. Moreau, starring Marlon Brando. Fate had other plans. Stanley was fired before studio meddling and Brando's erratic suggestions birthed one of the most whacked-out misfires of all time. A
2014 documentary explores the making of the 1996 disaster.
Stanley directed shorter pieces and documentaries in ensuing years but never seemed to realize his early potential. Until now, maybe. His gory take on writer H.P. Lovecraft's
Color Out of Space -- starring Nicolas Cage as the head of a family beseiged by an alien mutation -- opens Friday Jan. 24 only in theaters, including Chicago's
Music Box Theatre.
The 53-year-old Stanley recently talked by telephone about his re-emergence, Cage's potential to be the next Vincent Price and his plans to revisit Lovecraft's universe of evil cosmic gods itching to wipe out the human race. Here are edited excerpts from that conversation.
WBBM NEWSRADIO: I couldn't help but notice there's a cameo by Marlon Brando, in a vintage film clip played on a television, toward the end of your new movie. Was that a benevolent shout-out or some kind of catharsis?
RS: I think I was probably too sort of toxic for folks in the industry for quite a long while. But also, because I hadn't broken contracts or done anything to warrant removing me from the production, it meant that New Line Cinema and their parent company, Time Warner, were forced to pay me out a pretty substantial settlement after Island of Dr. Moreau, which meant I technically didn't have to work for a living anymore. I drifted away from the world and followed my heart, initially trying to get away from human beings completely.
WBBM: Was it necessary for you to get away from filmmaking and filmmakers for awhile, too?
RS: Me and Nic had been striking sparks off each other for a number of years. We initially talked about working together in the early-90s when Nic was briefly in the frame for Dust Devil. We share a very similar sensibility, which is helpful in that I tend to see all of my work as being as kind of a deadpan apocalyptic black comedy. Things are really terrible, but at the same time underneath it all there's also a level of queasy -- I guess, in gore terms, I'd almost think of it as 'splatstick.'
WBBM: Splatstick!
