31 Days of Horror: The Blob (1988)

As I wrote in this week’s Pick of the Week, I love 1950s-era science fiction/horror films. They are oh-so-very cheesy, but often they are made by good craftsmen and they can be quite enjoyable to watch.

The 1980s saw a string of those old movies being remade. John Carpenter turned The Thing From Another World (1951), an actually pretty great Cold War metaphor into his masterpiece, The Thing (1982). David Cronenberg turned the wonderfully silly The Fly (1958) into one of the all-time great body horror films. (We could also mention Phillip Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but that would bring us back to 1978 and I want to stick to the 1980s.)

In 1988 Chuck Russell got into the game and remade the goofy The Blob into a goopy, gnarly little horror film. It is my least favorite of these films, but it is still pretty great.

One of my favorite things about the film is that it introduces several characters in the beginning, people who give off Main Character Energy whom you figure will make it to the end of the film, and then it brutally murders them within the first half hour. It gives the movie that Game of Thrones feeling where nobody is really safe.

A meteorite lands just outside of a small town in California. Inside it is some gelatinous goo that feeds on human flesh and grows bigger every time it does.

The film takes time with its characters. It gives us some nice beats letting us understand them a little bit, even when it kills them soon after. This gives the movie the feeling of something more than just a big glob of goo murdering everyone.

Those kills are pretty sweet though. The special effects crew do a great job of making the blob look, well not realistic in any way, but effectively cool. The kills are varied and violent and bloody.

The plot gets pretty silly – there is a whole thing about a government agency swooping in to keep the blob safe in order to use it as a biological weapon (or did they invent it in the first place?), and the acting (led by Kevin Dillon and Shawnee Smith) is less than stellar. But mostly it is a lot of fun.