Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Boris Karloff’s Face Melting Off
Let’s be honest—if you’re adapting The Colour Out of Space, a paranoid cosmic horror tale about incomprehensible alien forces warping reality, you probably shouldn’t end up with what feels like a PSA about why it’s bad to garden with radioactive space rocks. And yet here we are, with Die, Monster, Die!, a film that took H.P. Lovecraft’s mind-bending horror and filtered it through a fog of British fog machines, stilted dialogue, and a script that makes Gilligan’s Island look like Solaris.
Welcome to the Witley estate, where plants grow too big, women go full Phantom of the Opera, and Boris Karloff is doing his best to act like he still believes in this movie. Spoiler: he doesn’t. And neither should you.
Plot: What Even Is Arkham Anymore?
We begin with Stephen Reinhart (Nick Adams), an American scientist who arrives in Arkham, England—a place that is allegedly England but looks suspiciously like a Universal backlot with a plastic fog filter. He’s here to visit his suspiciously evasive fiancée Susan Witley (Suzan Farmer), whose family estate makes The Addams Family look like a timeshare condo.
Her father Nahum Witley (Karloff) greets Stephen with the kind of warmth usually reserved for raccoons in a dumpster. Mom, Letitia, is in bed under a sheer curtain so we can’t see her face—an ominous clue that she’s either turning into a lizard or suffering from terminal melodrama. Soon, the butler drops dead. Strange noises come from the basement. The greenhouse is glowing. Oh, and the meteorite in the cellar is apparently more dangerous than Chernobyl on cheat day.
What unfolds is a slow, clunky unraveling of exposition and loosely stapled horror set pieces: glowing flowers! Disfigured servants! Axe-wielding Helga (yes, really)! Eventually, Nahum himself becomes a glowing, radioactive mummy who looks like someone wrapped Boris Karloff in tinfoil and set him on fire just to wake up the audience.
The Performances: A House Full of Sleepwalkers
Let’s address the Karloff in the room. Boris Karloff is a horror legend, a man who could terrify with just a whisper or a glance. In this film, though, he mostly sits in a wheelchair and delivers his lines like he’s waiting for a morphine drip. His eventual transformation into a glowing mutant is the only time the movie shows any energy, and by then it’s too late—he looks like a burning muppet made of glow sticks and regret.
Nick Adams, meanwhile, is all square-jawed confusion. His character spends most of the film wandering from room to room, asking questions and reacting with mild concern as people burst into flames or mutate into goo-covered axe-wielders. One suspects Adams was promised a very different movie, possibly one involving pants.
Suzan Farmer tries to act like she’s in a Jane Austen period drama that accidentally wandered into a Godzilla sequel. She spends the first half of the movie screaming “Stephen!” and the second half running from her irradiated family like she’s trying to escape a particularly aggressive PTA meeting.
Tone: Lovecraft By Way of Scooby-Doo
The real crime here is the treatment of Lovecraft’s original material. The Colour Out of Space is a bleak, existential nightmare about the unfathomable horror of alien influence. Die, Monster, Die! replaces that with a radioactive fern and a glowing rock that looks like it came from Spencer’s Gifts. The sense of dread is absent, replaced by “mysterious noises” and characters whose solution to everything is to go into the greenhouse again and stare blankly at things.
This is not so much an adaptation as a “loosely inspired shrug.” It’s like someone heard about the Lovecraft story once, possibly while drunk, and decided it would be the perfect backdrop for an awkward family drama, complete with disfigured relatives and dad trying to burn down the house with himself in it.
Special Effects: Death by Lava Lamp
Let’s not mince words: the effects are about as terrifying as an overcooked grilled cheese. The meteorite looks like someone glued Christmas lights to a charcoal briquette. The glowing greenhouse plants are clearly papier-mâché nightmares from a 5th grade science fair. And Karloff’s final meltdown is less tragic transformation and more grandpa’s glowstick rave gone wrong.
The monster? There isn’t one. Or maybe everything is the monster? Either way, the title is a lie. No monsters die. No one shouts “Die, Monster, Die!” And frankly, it’s rude to yell at the meteorite. It never asked to be part of this.
Final Thoughts: Die, Movie, Die!
There are bad Lovecraft adaptations (The Dunwich Horror, Necronomicon, anything involving Nic Cage’s hairline), and then there’s Die, Monster, Die!—a film so flat and forgettable, it makes you nostalgic for those early ‘60s drive-in features where at least someone got eaten by a guy in a rubber suit.
This movie is cursed, not because of any meteorite, but because it commits the most unholy cinematic sin of all: it’s boring. Lifeless. Glacially paced. It limps toward its fiery climax like Karloff himself, burdened by age, script, and a paycheck he clearly regrets cashing.
Rating: 1.5 out of 5 Glowing Pebbles
And that’s just for Karloff’s melting face, which deserves better than the rest of this glowing compost heap. If you want cosmic horror, read the book. If you want cosmic boredom, watch this instead. Just bring garlic. For the script.
