The Blob (1988)
"Scream now while there's still time to breathe"

Plot
A meteor crashes to Earth housing a strange alien blob which consumes human beings for food and grows in size to enormous proportions. It's up to a rebellious teenager and his cheerleader girlfriend to save the day.
If there was ever a film that needed a remake, it was the cult 50s science fiction classic The Blob. That was a campy affair with not-so-great effects (and that's being generous) which is revered a lot more fondly than it had any right to be. But the idea of a creature that could absorb it's victims and increase in size was obviously too big a lure for anyone in Hollywood to avoid, especially as the 80s saw a spate of gross out visceral horror remakes of 50s hits. Alongside John Carpenter's remake of The Thing and David Cronenberg's remake of The Fly, The Blob embraced practical effects to showcase off the body horror that horror fans could only have dreamed about years earlier. The Blob runs like a complete breath of fresh air for the time in which it was made. Instead of going for the same style of camp and cheese as the original or even sticking with the 80s trend of goofy horror-comedies, this one goes all out for the visceral horror aspect and plays itself deadly serious. It was criminally overlooked when it was released but has thankfully gone on to get somewhat of a cult following and it's easy to see why.

The Blob is far superior to the original in almost every aspect and it shows that sometimes remakes can be worthwhile if there is a real desire, a real framework and a real idea of how to top the original. The whole idea works a lot better this time around with a more serious tone and although there are moments of humour, this is no laughing matter. The Blob sets its mood out from the beginning so it doesn't have chance to fall into any goofy traps - this one is a nasty piece of work. The creature is as unforgiving and merciless as any on-screen monster I've ever seen. And thanks to that ‘nothing is sacred’ rule that the writers have, we get pretty much anything goes. Whilst the story starts off with a very similar look, feel and tone to the original, once the first victim has been devoured then all hell breaks loose.
One of the problems of the original was the actual blob itself. What it did to its victims was only suggested or glimpsed in a few rather silly moments with strawberry jelly seemingly tossed across miniature sets with gleeful abandon. Here, the blob is given a lot more screen time which means we get to see what it actually does. The special effects for the blob look good and, although some shots have dated badly, the creature oozes and drips its way menacingly across the screen. You don't get the sense that this is some strawberry jelly monster - it's a nasty, relentless killing machine, sentient and malevolent. It drips off ceilings, slithers through drains and crawls up walls. To say this was all done pre-CGI, it's very well put together. The scene inside the cinema is an excellent example of how to hide the limitation of your special effects but create such an effective atmosphere, with the blob being illuminated via the use of strobe lighting.

Whereas it was only ever suggested what happened to its victims in the original, The Blob goes all out to show you everything. The full force of graphic 80s violence is on display here, the screen filled with unnerving gore at the behest of a team of make-up effects artists at the top of their game. People get disintegrated and dissolved by the blob and the carnage is all seen in its visceral glory. There are really memorable moments including some poor schmuck getting sucked down the sink, a woman being trapped inside a phone box whilst the blob oozes around it with disintegrated bodies floating around, and, in a lesson to jerk boyfriends trying to take advantage of their drunken girlfriends, a scene in a car which is both poetic and haunting at the same time. If you've got a weak stomach, it'd be best to give this one a miss as even I was shocked at how gruesome it got but also how effective the gore looks for 1988. Every penny of the budget is on show here and much like the aforementioned remakes of The Fly and The Thing, the focus on body horror practical effects really allows this to stand out.
The cast isn't too bad and Shawnee Smith and Kevin Dillon do the best they can with their throwaway roles as the cheerleader and the town rebel respectively. Dillon is especially irritating at first with his macho attitude but at least mellows throughout the course of the film. A lot of the supporting characters don't make it out alive and I was really surprised when some of the cast were killed off. Even little kids aren't safe in this one! Kudos to the writers for having the props to do that. There are some attempts at humour in the film including a very funny gag about a nervous teenager buying condoms which is pretty juvenile until the pay-off a couple of scenes later. But this is more or less restricted to the pre-blob part of the film. Once the blob starts getting hungry, the film moves up a gear, ditches the silly comedy drama and goes straight into horror mode.
The only major problem I had with the film is that it got a little silly once the government got involved and explanations were given as to what the blob was. Can't we just believe that it's an alien from space and not some man-made monster? The conspiracy theories ruined the idea of the blob for me and the finale third with the town being quarantined and the soldiers looking for the blob just stinks the place up. We needed to see more people being dissolved and disintegrated at this point, not watching a precursor to an X-Files episode.
Final Verdict
The Blob is without a doubt one of the best horror films to come out of the slasher-soaked 80s and definite proof that remakes don't always have to suck. It's fast-paced, frenetic, scary at times and features some awesome make-up effects. They don't remake them like this anymore! Sadly, this didn't do very well at the box office but has become a cult favourite and is now looked at as an 80s classic.
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The Blob Director(s): Chuck Russell Writer(s): Theodore Simonson (earlier screenplay), Kay Linaker (earlier screenplay), Irvine H. Millgate (story), Chuck Russell (screenplay), Frank Darabont (screenplay) Actor(s): Kevin Dillon, Shawnee Smith, Donovan Leitch, Jeffrey DeMunn, Candy Clark, Joe Seneca, Del Close Duration: 95 mins | ![]() |
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