Cage Rage Marathon: 5 Wildest Movies Starring Nicolas Cage to Watch After the Surfer
Nicolas Cage is the most eccentric actor in Hollywood right now, with the most diverse filmography you can imagine – and these five projects are the best proof of that.
The diversity of Nicolas Cage's roles is astonishing – in the last few years alone, the actor has played a satanist, the Devil, Count Dracula and a retired Special Forces soldier.
On May 2, The Surfer was finally released in theaters – a movie in which Cage played a father who gets into a tense confrontation with cultists on the beach.
In honor of the release of another crazy movie with Nic Cage, we decided to remember his other most unusual roles.
1. Mandy, 2018
Mandy director Panos Cosmatos clearly knows what to do with Nicolas Cage's wild energy and uses it masterfully.
In the first half of the movie, he sends Nicolas, who plays a lumberjack whose wife is kidnapped by a religious cult, on a dark psychedelic trip, creating the cinematic equivalent of a panic attack.
And in the second half, he lets Nic have his fun, giving him a chainsaw and sending him out to brutally kill enemies in a blood-red glow. Never before has Cage been so terrifyingly cool, and never before has a movie made such brilliant use of this extraordinary actor.
2. Willy's Wonderland, 2021
One of the last works of the actor in the B-movie genre and at the same time one of the most curious. Director Kevin Lewis offers us to see Cage in an unusual light: here he is not a screaming madman, but a quiet man who is not very surprised by all the absurdity happening around him.
Nicolas' character gets a job as a janitor in an abandoned children's center to fix his car – and when the animatronic toys come to life at night, like in the game Five Nights at Freddy's, he has to confront them.
3. Color Out of Space, 2019
After Mandy, interest in Cage and his performances has grown considerably. Color Out of Space is probably the most obvious attempt to repeat the success of Cosmatos' film.
It has a similar aesthetic and color scheme, the same slow-burner structure with a sharp emotional explosion at the end. It has a Lovecraftian atmosphere and the crazy sparkle characteristic of Cage's films.
Nathan lives far from civilization with his wife and three children. One day, a meteorite falls near his home, and now unusual flowers grow around it, and television and cell phone service are disrupted.
4. Primal, 2019
Hunter Frank has caught a big white jaguar and is now on a ship to deliver the animal to the zoo and get a tidy sum for it. Of course, everything is not so simple – a dangerous criminal is being transported on the same ship.
At some point, he will escape from custody and free the jaguar – and it is Cage who will have to fight two dangerous predators at once.
Primal is an exemplary crazy movie with Nicolas Cage, who seems to have absorbed all the pros and cons of the genre.
5. Mom and Dad, 2017
Another wild horror in Cage's filmography is Brian Taylor's black comedy about an epidemic of strange madness that causes parents to kill their children.
Even before the bloody meat grinder begins, the actor reaches the true heights of tragic expression: the head of the family, fed up with life, terribly burdened by all the obligations of adult life, sets up a secret refuge in the basement.
He sets up a pool table, and after another remark from his wife, he loses his temper, smashes it with a sledgehammer, and delivers a piercing monologue.
