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Amphibians in Movies   Color Out of Space (2019)   Spoiler Alert ! Some of these pictures and descriptions may give away plot details that you might not want to know before watching the film.   I watched this intense horror/mystery/sci-fi movie because I liked the movie Mandy, which also had a salamander cameo, and this was made by same studio, and because I like Nicholas Cage in horror movies where he goes berzerk. He's become a master at that and he can probably play these roles in his sleep now. Since it was made by producers who made Mandy, maybe I shouldn't have been surprised to see another salamander cameo. It showed up at about 33 minutes into the two hour film, so I hoped that it would have a large role later - maybe it would be possessed by the aliens and terrorize the countryside shooting bolts of lightening out of its cloaca or something cool like that... but no such luck. The salamander was onscreen only once in a static shot that lasted ten seconds - an eternity for what is basically a still shot - so I guess they really wanted us to get a good look at it. It did not move and we did not get a closer look at it. (The enlargement above is my doing.) This is just another brief and trivial salamander cameo, like every other salamander appearance in a fiction film that I have seen. So far. There's a toad cameo later with a live toad that moves, but for some reason it's not magenta. The plot is based on the classic short story by H. P. Lovecraft. (FYI, I've read the story, and there's no salamander in it.) A meteor lands next to the water well on the property of a family living on an isolated farm in the middle of some ancient woods in Massachussetts. It brings something alien with it that turns plants and animals around the well a magenta color. It also disrupts electronics - cell phones, tvs and radios, and car batteries - and it pollutes the water table, mutates animals and people, and drives everybody in the family insane. Cue Nick Cage. We never see the alien, only the color and the destruction it causes, but we do see some brief visions of a worm-covered magenta planet with a giant sun, so that seems to be where it came from. Soon after the meteor lands, before we see lots of magenta flowers, vines, insects, and flashes of light, the first thing we see that is changed by the color is a salamander that we see sitting on a brick on top of the well. The well plays a big part in the movie. It becomes the focus point for the alien presence and it eventually blows up into a giant magenta tornado, but the salamander never returns. I noticed that the salamander was not a natural color, but I wonder if other viewers knew that. Most people don't even know what a salamander is. (One person in the IMDB Trivia comments mentions it, and the unusual color, but thinks it's a gecko.) It never moves at all, so it might be a fake plastic salamander that somebody painted with magenta highlights. What makes me uncertain about that is the placement of its left front and right rear legs and feet. They don't look like the legs of a plastic toy, but more like the legs and feet of a live salamander that stopped walking. Maybe it's a very realistic fake plastic salamander or a very good CGI effect based on a picture of a live salamander, or maybe it's a real salamander with coloring that was added on a computer. The line between real and fake is so thin in movies these days, that it's getting harder and harder to know. Our Deep Fake future is not far off....