THE BLOB (1988) Full of fresh blobbly goodness (I pretty much had to write a review of this one, considering that for about a year now I've had a link to a review for it on my site and I know that I've never written one!) There's a lot of stuff wrong with The Blob, but it still manages to be one of the best monster movies of the 80's, and it blessedly turns a fun but too silly/campy original film into an often silly thriller which, nevertheless, delivers the thrills. The opening credits give us a nicely stark tour through the small mountain town in which this is set, and remind us that director Chuck Russell goes by "Chuck" when he's making horror movies and "Charles" when he's not. We get to see a few slices of small-town life (football game, young-hood-heading-for-trouble tries jumping a washed-out bridge) before a meteor crashes way out in the woods and the blob inside attacks a homeless guy. It takes about a half hour to get going, but it doesn't stop once it does. The Blob has a fairly big cast, and about half of the people you assume are going to survive until the end don't, and that includes the little kids. I don't necessarily think that the choice of who ultimately makes it that far is a good one (never thought I'd see the day when I actually liked the football jock), but at least there's a refreshing abandon in how the script (by Russell and Frank Darabont, before either of them went "respectable") doesn't make anybody off-bounds. I probably would have most liked to have seen Kevin Dillon as the trouble-bound loner kid get blobified. I've never understood why he kept getting as many roles as he did. He can't act. And he looks just like Liv Tyler, and Liv Tyler does not make a very good-looking man. What's left? The Dillon-family name recognition? But the rest of the cast is loaded with "Hey, it's him/her!" treats, like Paul McCrane as a deputy, Erika Eleniak as a not-drunk-enough girl in the backseat of a car, and Jeffrey DeMunn as the town sheriff. Charlie Spradling is apparently in here somewhere, but I didn't see her (dammit all to hell!). And Bill "Choptop" Moseley plays Solder #2! Special effects throughout are not quite excellent, but they're very good, and they're gruesome as hell, and you can do a lot worse for inspiration than John Carpenter's The Thing. Surely, the most memorable effect here has to be when one poor bastard gets sucked right into a sink drain, definitely not a place where I'd like to spend my dying moments. Some of the FX are too obviously blue-screened, but they're used to fun effect, like how in one scene the blob uses a big fluke-like tendril to swat one fleeing resident like a fly. The Blob has a good sense of humor, rarely going over into camp; the funniest part has to be when the football jock meets his date's dad (set up by an equally funny scene in the pharmacy earlier on). It also contains one of the best person-gets-killed-to-person-eating/preparing-food cuts I've seen, appropriately using Jell-o. Not all of the jokes work ("I feel like a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest" - come on, this was old when the first movie came out), particularly Dillon's lame wisecracks, but you've gotta give this movie points for containing the line that was never included in any of the Friday the 13th movies, but should've been: "Wait a minute...hockey season ended months ago!" Nobody really sees a blob movie for plot twists, but to be sure, there is one near the end, which I wouldn't feel right giving away, even though it doesn't really amount to anything. But other than that, this movie probably works best if you haven't seen the original movie; for example, the "silver bullet" against the blob (yeah, I know, I hate these things) is hinted at several times throughout, and it's kind of painful when you already know what it is. And I guess the handy appearance of a bazooka near the end of the film is, to say the least, a little contrived. The ending left things wide open for a sequel, which never happened, since I don't think this was much of a hit at the time. But like Deep Rising a decade later (if nowhere near as good), it picked up a devoted cult of fans within a few years. I cling to hope. BACK TO THE B's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE