“We have David Cronenberg at home…” Cronenberg at home: COLONY MUTATION (1995) from Visual Vengeance

 

All images courtesy: Visual Vengeance

Visual Vengeance may specialize in revamping shot-on-video genre movies from the VHS era, but every now and then they bring us something shot on film – if still for the straight-to-video market. Such is the case with their new disc of 1995’s Colony Mutation, which boasts a director-supervised 2K restoration; words you definitely don’t expect to see on a Visual Vengeance cover, because usually that’s not even an option. Shot on Super 8 film with a shoestring budget (but the admirable ambition to still shoot on celluloid and not VHS), this regional oddity from Milwaukee, WI comes to us with multiple viewing options: this new 2K director’s edition film scan, an original VHS master for those wanting a nostalgic experience, or a previous DVD restoration, for reasons that are unclear. And of course, Visual Vengeance have packed the disc with extras. But is Colony Mutation a successful experiment that’s worth the trouble?

THE FILM:

 

Dr. Meredith Weaver and her husband Jim work at the same biotech company: she does questionably ethical experiments with genetic mutation serums, and he mostly cheats on her with a co-worker. When she finds out about the affair, she throws a vial of one of her mutagen serums in his face during a fight. Soon his body starts transforming: each of his body parts takes on a life of its own, and when they get too hungry, they break away from him and go off to eat human victims. He also starts to go insane and develops a bloodlust to hunt and kill people to feed his limbs. It’s a premise which wears its influences on its sleeve: Colony Mutation is very transparently a microbudget, DIY homage to David Cronenberg (especially his early films like Shivers, Rabid, and Videodrome – particularly the former two), with similar leanings of psychosexual body horror.

 

On paper (or, as sold by Visual Vengeance’s wonderfully outlandish cover art) this sounds pretty fun; after all, what B-movie horror fan doesn’t enjoy some gory body horror with cool practical creature effects? But Colony Mutation unfortunately just isn’t up to the challenge. As a rule, if you are going to pay homage to the master of psychosexual body horror, while it’s understandable that you won’t be able to actually match the quality of Cronenberg’s work, the body horror aspects had better at least be competent, and deliver in the creature effects department. But competency is a standard that this film badly struggles to meet. This is simply a very poorly made film, on pretty much every level; and not poorly made in a fun, disasterpiece kind of way, but in a miserable-slog kind of way.

Most unforgivably, Colony Mutation mostly fails to deliver the promised outlandish creature effects. For the majority of the movie, the stuff with Jim’s body disassembling and turning into individual limb-monsters is kept largely offscreen. We hang on close-ups of actor David Rommell’s squirming face while he (and some squelchy foley effects) tries to convince us that his limbs are detaching from his body and slithering off to do violence we don’t quite see. He is supposedly feeding the meat of his victims into a second mouth that has grown in his stomach, but for most of the movie we don’t SEE the mouth, we just see him miming the action with his back to camera. It is painfully obvious that the film is unable to show us these sights, and must imply them instead, because the filmmakers do not have the resources or skills to actually deliver the effects. And honestly I’m not giving this one a pass because of the low budget; plenty of DIY microbudget horror films (say, 1989’s Beyond Dream’s Door, 1993’s Ozone, 1986’s The Abomination, or 1983’s The Deadly Spawn – I love movies like that, and was just as prepared to love this one) give us very memorable creature effects work, scraped together on a shoestring thanks to ingenuity and creativity. I think Colony Mutation is purely let down by the abilities of the filmmakers. We do eventually get creature effects; quite a lot of creature effects at the finale. But they just are not very good, and come too little too late. Rubber limbs that largely look pretty inanimate and are clearly being pulled by strings or wiggled by off-camera hands; prosthetics that are very unconvincing, even for the budget bracket; some very dodgy compositing work… A few effects moments work well, but for the most part, even when grading the film on a curve to make allowances for its budget, the effects are a big letdown.

 

The same could be said for the film at a narrative and script level. The movie is almost grasping at some decent themes, about both sexual and class violence, I’ll give it that much. The main character is a sleazy, arrogant, manipulative, and dishonest guy who finds himself turned into a literal monster by this serum, and his attacks feel both reflective of his misogyny (his attacks on women victims definitely are coded as sexual assaults) and his classism (he also attacks and eats homeless men, a wealthy yuppie literally chewing up and devouring the poor and treating them as disposable). A better director could have done something compelling with these themes, and fleshed them out enough that the film actually had something to say.  But instead, the movie just vaguely gestures towards these themes, and doesn’t get much further than “yep, this guy sure is a monster.” Likewise, the plot itself is very ill-defined, and largely just fumbles along, with Jim’s character motivations and level of monstrousness fluctuating wildly from scene to scene without much cohesion. This movie has shockingly little momentum; Colony Mutation is under 80 minutes, and yet manages to feel torpidly paced and boring.

Then there’s the cinematography. While it is impressive that director Tom Berna elected to shoot this on film and not VHS, Colony Mutation is a very poorly shot movie. He says in the extras that the movie was shot by film students from the local college, and… yeah, that makes sense. There are some good shot compositions to be found throughout, but just as many that are clumsy and bad, and clearly the work of students who have a lot to learn. But when it comes to color temperature and exposure, this movie is a MESS. Color temperature fluctuates wildly from shot to shot, even within a single scene’s shot/reverse-shot editing, with one image being yellow and then the next being blue. The color on the film is so erratic it’s downright shocking; even on other microbudget indies shot for similar amounts of money, I’ve never seen one quite this bad. A lot of the movie is also clearly shot too bright or too dark, with faces sometimes blown out by too much exposure, or shots where the gain has been cranked so far to try and overcome the lack of light that there is severe visual distortion. It is unclear to me if this may have been exacerbated by the film elements having degraded with age, or if it looked like that to begin with, but whatever the reason, Colony Mutation looks ROUGH – and this is after what director Tom Berna says in the extras was an extensive restoration.

 

There are some bright spots. The acting is generally pretty good, for a DIY feature, with the actors giving it their all, and doing an admirable job. The lead actor in particular clearly knows what he is doing, and it’s no surprise that Berna says he was a stage actor with some experience. The movie also has a pretty solid score and soundtrack, by composer/songwriter Patrick Nettesheim, who also wrote the score for the notorious cult classic Coven, of American Movie fame. And as I said earlier, at least occasionally the effects do work, and offer some neat moments, though not enough. It’s not a totally irredeemable movie, it’s just… mostly very bad.

THE VISUAL VENGEANCE BLU-RAY:

Usually this is where I would talk about the transfer, but this is a rare case where the visuals of the film are so erratic and sloppy, to the point of being a defining feature of the experience, that I needed to cover it in the review itself. But that’s just a reality of the film elements, and not necessarily a reflection of Visual Vengeance’s restoration work. According to the director, extensive restoration was done to clean up the film, remove dirt and scratches, and overhaul its color grade, so I will take his word for it that this is the best possible restoration of Colony Mutation. It just doesn’t show, and I have some trouble believing that there was really no way to get the color-grading more consistent than this. However, this is not the only way to watch the film on this disc: Visual Vengeance have also included the original VHS version of the film. In some ways this feels more appropriate, as a true time-capsule of the straight-to-video era for which the film was shot, and it must be said that the softer and more faded analog quality of the VHS version does sort of smooth out the erratic nature of the picture quality. The new restoration is definitely better, but there would be something to be said for watching it in the throwback tape presentation instead. There is also an intermediate restoration from the previous DVD, but there’s really no reason for this to have been included, as it looks pretty terrible.

It is interesting to note that Tom Berna gave Colony Mutation something of a director’s-revised-edition treatment for this blu-ray, a la Blade Runner: The Final Cut or the Star Wars Special Editions. He totally redid the opening credits sequence, and redid a small handful of composite shots throughout: an establishing shot of the genetics corporation that now has the company logo on the building, and a few completely overhauled shots of winged body-part monsters flying through the air in the climax, which just don’t work very well in the VHS version. He also made some small edits throughout, which shorten the film by about 6 minutes. I think it’s pretty cool that he did this, and used the opportunity afforded by this new 2k remaster to fix some issues he saw with the film, especially since the VHS version is here to compare with. These changes do make a bit of a difference for improving the film – though I would argue not enough to actually make it a better movie. I do applaud him for showing the initiative to give us a new director’s cut though.

 

As far as extras go, we have new interviews with director Tom Berna, lead actor David Rommel, and composer Patrick Nettesheim (who also talks quite a bit about Coven), all of which are pretty interesting, and provide some insights into the microbudget production. There is also a commentary by Berna, which is not as good as the interview; he is clearly reading off of notes (and at one point, accidentally reads the same note during two scenes in a row), and it’s pretty stilted and non-conversational, with long stretches of silence throughout. Rounding out the extras are an archival commentary from the previous DVD, and a vintage public-access-TV interview with Berna from when the film was in production. A solid roster of extras for the film.

As always, Visual Vengeance have put together a very impressive disc. However, I found so little to like in Colony Mutation that I can’t recommend it. The only people who should check this one out are absolute die-hards for weird microbudget regional indie horror. If that’s you, there might be enough here to make this worth a look, as an unearthed curiosity from the bygone days of the straight-to-VHS era. Otherwise, avoid this one, and scratch that lo-fi horror itch with a DIY gem like Beyond Dream’s Door, Ozone, or The Deadly Spawn instead.

 

- Christopher S. Jordan