With word of an upcoming prequel to The Blob, Andrew reviews the original and the remake.
♫
Beware of the Blob! ♫
♫ It creeps and leaps and glides and slides across the floor ♫
♫ Right through the door and all around the wall, ♫
♫ A splotch, a blotch, ♫
♫ Be careful of the Blob! ♫
♫ It creeps and leaps and glides and slides across the floor ♫
♫ Right through the door and all around the wall, ♫
♫ A splotch, a blotch, ♫
♫ Be careful of the Blob! ♫
In 1958, American International Pictures released an
independently produced B horror flick for drive-in double features exhibition
about a killer slime from outer space that assimilates its victims and grows
red with human blood. The big screen
debut of actor Steve McQueen, with a snarky opening track by Burt Bacharach and
Mack David, The Blob quickly became a
respectable classic of the 50s creature feature genre, spawning a big budget
remake in 1988 as well as inspiring the likes of Night of the Creeps and Slither. Let us look at how a
jar of preserves became one of the most formidable and iconic movie monsters of
the horror genre.
The
Blob (1958 – directed by Irvin S. Yeaworth, Jr.)
Originally titled The
Molten Meteor, this 1958 drive-in classic cost a mere $110,000 and wound up
taking in $4 million at the box office!
One of the first truly independent horror films to be shot in both color
and the newly developed widescreen format, The
Blob is a cult phenomenon of enduring popularity. The plot is exceedingly simple: a meteor
crashes near Downingtown, Pennsylvania.
An elderly man approaches the crash site and upon prodding the meteor
with a stick, it cracks open to reveal a slimy substance of some kind. The slime climbs up the stick and attaches
itself to the man’s hand, turning red almost immediately as it sucks his blood
and begins to dissolve his body. Soon
the creature grows larger until it’s a giant beast wreaking havoc on the small
town. Only a teenager named Steve (Steve
McQueen) who tried to help the elder early on may know how to stop it!
The charm of The
Blob infects almost immediately as the snarky song warns listeners with an
impish tickle to the side. While most
creature feature drive-in thrillers of the day absolutely invited laughter for
their shoddy technical merits and campy theatrics, The Blob is something of an outlier with the self-aware opening
title sequence, as a single wobbling red circle forms multiple circles within
one another before taking up the screen.
If you’re here to laugh at The
Blob, the film gets the chuckles of appreciation out of the way
immediately, though it should be noted the film has a consistently sharp sense
of humor in almost every scene. While
the simplistic special effects for The
Blob call attention to themselves, notably in the climactic diner sequence
when it engulfs an entire restaurant by rolling silicon over still
strategically placed photographs, it’s the stock characters that make The Blob shine.
Although Steve McQueen would eventually voice
dismay over The Blob being his debut,
he’s fantastic in the role of the lone hero no one believes as he takes on the
unknown horrors of the cosmos single-handedly. Overall, the ensemble cast of characters, from the skeptical policemen,
the teenage pals of McQueen and the locals who cannot bring themselves to
believing his story about a killer slime running amok, never misstep or
overplay their scenes. This is too well
acted for another average drive-in double feature. Further still, some of the more elite critics
have read The Blob as emblematic of
the Red Scare, with Communism silently creeping into the United States and
assimilating all in its path.
With time, The
Blob would spawn a 1971 sequel entitled Son
of Blob, or whichever title the various distributors would ultimately
use. The movie theater (recently
restored) used in the trailer showing hundreds of terrified spectators running
for their lives from an over sized blob is now a tourist attraction for local
reenactments of that very scene! The
diner itself in the film’s final scene also became a fixture for movie
memorabilia, with the famous basement open for tourism on weekday mornings. Exactly 30 years later, writer Frank Darabont
(The Shawshank Redemption) and
director Chuck Russell (A Nightmare on
Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors) would reimagine the classic B movie as a
visual effects laden nightmare of 80s horror.
7/10
The
Blob (1988 – written and directed by Chuck Russell)
As with the 1958 The
Blob, Chuck Russell’s expensive remake follows much of the same trajectory
with several idiosyncratic deviations and additions to the killer slime. Transposing the outbreak to Arborville,
California, Steve McQueen’s shoes are filled instead by Saw regular Shawnee Smith when she witnesses her boyfriend being
devoured by the blob as he attempts to call the police for help. Unlike the silent killer slime creeping about
in the 1958 film, this new creation grunts and groans, whips out tentacles and
can quickly speed up to snatch its victims.
In one startling sequence, a teenager trying to have sex with his
girlfriend is horrified to find the creature bursting from her mouth and eye
sockets before it kills him too. If
that’s not enough to promote the new blob as a force to be reckoned with, it also
yanks a man down a kitchen sink erator, splits another man in half by his
spine, throws people about with its tentacles like children’s toys, and carries
with it decomposing bodies in its slithering mass. This is The
Blob for the John Carpenter Thing generation.
The
Blob provides a cavalcade of cult character actors,
including director Nicolas Roeg’s former sweetheart Candy Clark, Kevin Dillon
as Shawnee Smith’s love interest, and Bill Moseley of Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 and The
Devil’s Rejects fame shows up. Singer
and scream queen Shawnee Smith quickly adorns the Ellen Ripley shoes as she musters
up the courage to take on the creature armed with a machine gun and fire
extinguishers. We even get a crazed
Reverend (Del Close) who believes the creature is a prophecy of the end of the
world. Where The Blob stumbles, however, is the Bioweapons Division subplot involving men in airtight suits wanting
to use the creature for biological warfare, as if the film really needed Ridley
Scott’s Alien shoehorned into the
proceedings. Too bad that an otherwise
solid 80s creature feature just had to tack this cliché on, although years
later it would work to greater effect in writer Frank Darabont’s adaptation of
Stephen King’s The Mist.
Overall the new Blob
is a special effects bonanza and thrilling update to the 1958 film with a
surprising amount of scares and grotesquerie. Between the two, however, despite the technical updates on display and
homage to the tropes of the 1958 film, upon watching this, the charm of the
original which inspired it is lacking somewhat here. When Frank Oz remade Roger Corman’s Little Shop of Horrors as David Geffen’s
off Broadway musical, critics were quick to assail the update’s sophisticated
visual effects puppetry as draining the playful nature of the original cheapie
out of the film. While not entirely
true, one must wonder if that same argument is applicable to Chuck Russell’s
update. It’s a fun 80s B movie much like
the original, if only it knew better how to keep its tongue firmly planted in cheek
and not become too lost in self-seriousness.
That’s not to say Russell’s film isn’t rife with comic relief, but
there’s something about that Burt Bacharach song opening the 1958 picture that
simply cannot be duplicated.
6/10 - Andrew Kotwicki