‘The Blob’ Is A Terrifically Nasty And Sly Satire Of ‘50s Era Creature Features

The same year director Chuck Russell made his feature-film debut (A Nightmare On Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, arguably the best of the Elm Street series), Michael Gornick’s not well-remembered Creepshow 2 made an attempt at adapting Stephen King’s extraordinary short story “The Raft.” Concerning a group of teens stuck on a little wooden platform on the middle of a lake while a sentient oil slick hunts them from the water, there is a level of meanness to King’s story, a guignol explicitness to its atrocities. I was terribly disappointed in the adaptation, but I wouldn’t have to wait long for a better homage.

One year later in 1988, Russell returned with a remake of Yeaworth and Doughten’s 1958 creature featureThe Blob, and gave me as faithful an unofficial adaptation of “The Raft” possible while still being conventionally entertaining. Russell’s The Blob is lean, mean, and paced like a heart attack. In addition to setpieces in a diner and movie theater ported over from the original, it calls out to other genre classics like James Cameron’s Aliens in a semi-aquatic chase through the sewers and Hitchcock’s The Birds in a nasty phone booth murder. It’s smart and funny, uncompromising in its gore and body count, and manages to be a sly satire of the creature feature in all the ways it sets up established tropes only to undermine them in clever and unexpected ways. 

Start with the hero, high school football hero Paul Taylor (Donovan Leitch), everybody’s all-American, who’s armed with good looks, athleticism, and a charming sense of self-deprecation. We naturally root for him when he builds up the courage to ask out head cheerleader Meg Penny (Shawnee Smith) after getting his bell rung during the big game. He’s hot and he doesn’t know it. He’s got it all — a strong moral compass, too — so when he accidentally drives into the homeless guy (Billy Beck) stumbling into the middle of a road cutting through the forest outside of their small town, he and Meg do the right thing and bring him to the emergency room to get whatever that thing is on his hand looked at. For good measure, he also forces local leather-jacket motorcycle rebel Brian (Kevin Dillon) to come along, just in case Brian’s had anything to do with the sad shape of their local hobo.

The set-up is perfect for Brian, the rebel, to show some courage later while dying in an act of supreme sacrifice for this beautiful couple, football god and his prom queen, to restore society around the comingling of their privilege. But Russell immediately has other things in mind. When the thing on the homeless guy’s hand turns out to be a mutant virus transmogrified into a gooey apex predator, its second victim is, of all people, the guy set up to be the traditional hero of the piece: that’s right, Paul gets absorbed, graphically, in the first of the film’s highly-effective shock moments. We’re off guard from the start – everything we thought we knew is now uncertain, and if Paul can die like this, without anything like heroics, then anyone can die. This is the scene where Chuck Russell’s The Blob becomes a masterpiece. It so buggers expectation that it’s easy to discredit how much character development has been invested in this moment. Paul is strong but vulnerable, the victim of a couple of big hits during the game and also of an uncomfortable gag where his teammate Scott (Ricky Paull Goldin) buys ribbed condoms from a grumpy pharmacist (Art LaFleur) – saying he’s buying them for Paul, and then it turns out the pharmacists is Meg’s dad when Paul goes to pick her up. He’s good-natured and well-meaning and when he gets melted, dismembered and eaten, the rest of the film is charged with chaotic evil.

Indeed, The Blob is lawless. A sweet courtship between Sheriff Geller (Jeffrey DeMunn) and diner waitress Fran (Candy Clark) begins with a tentative invitation to dinner after work, a gentle rebuttal, then a handwritten note to leave the door to romance propped open just a little. DeMunn and Clark play an entire range of emotions into one short sequence and it’s fair to expect this to be the secondary tale mirroring the central romance between Paula and Meg – but like that central romance, things go very wrong almost immediately. The brilliance of The Blob is how cruelly it pays off its lovely moments: how when the Blob grows like a carnivorous Katamari Damacy and starts eating everyone in little “Arborville, CA,” Fran tries to find shelter in a phone booth where she calls the number Sheriff Geller has left for her to call for their date. The dispatch operator tells her that Sheriff Geller has gone to the diner but hasn’t checked in at around the same time Fran sees Geller’s mostly-melted and absorbed corpse smashed against the glass. It’s deliciously atrocious: a horrific image made melancholic by Fran reaching out to a man she might have loved in another lifetime; a man who has given his life to check on her, the woman he hoped to share the same other lifetime with. It sets up Brian as a fledgling daredevil with some basic mechanical tinkering skills who hasn’t quite put it all together, but will be expected to use his biking and crafting know-how in a life-or-death situation. And it sets up Meg as a nice girl who loves her parents and her bratty little brother Kevin (Michael Kenworthy), Kevin who sneaks into a slasher flick with his best friend Eddie (Douglas Emerson). She’s mostly passive at first, an object to be adored or lusted after, but when the going gets rough, she throws herself violently into the role of protector of her kid brother. She gets the Roy Scheider “you sonofabitch” line from Jaws at the film’s climax. She’s tough as nails. 

Brian’s hostility towards the government, the clergy, and the constabulary reflect a running theme in 1980s pictures both underground (Repo Man, Alligator, The Howling) and mainstream (Aliens, Predator, Raiders of the Lost Ark), all in stark opposition to the Reagan administration’s policy of patriotic nationalism. In additions to the remake absent from the original, The Blob includes a mad preacher Reverend Meeker (Del Close) who nurses a shard of the Blob in a canning jar at his roadside tent revival; a shady defense department scientist Dr. Meadows (Joe Seneca) excited about the prospects of weaponizing angry pink goop; and an entire department of cops who are too busy hassling the long-hairs to realize the end of the world draws nigh. And all of it: its subversive streak, its stronger than strong character work, its just-right supporting performances from a veteran group of legendary bit players (none of it surprising perhaps given Russell and co-writer Frank Darabont’s track record), is bolstered by practical effects by Tony Gardner and his crew of madmen. Gardner oversaw the injection of painted parachute fabrics injected with a food-thickening gel draped over puppet armatures, air bladders and, yes, people, to animate the monster with the illusion of terrible, slippery life. A graduate of Rick Baker’s crew, Gardner also worked on Nightbreed, Swamp Thing, The Lost Boys and Starman before making his mark with the half-zombie in Dan O’Bannon’s Return of the Living Dead, a gag he recreated in part for the final fate of the homeless guy in The Blob. His work on The Blob is uniformly exceptional. I love how the Blob melts flesh, digesting it as it floats over it. And I love the throwback use of miniatures and in-camera visual tricks during its centerpiece movie theater attack where, in the glow of the projector’s lamp, we get nightmare flashes of the Blob running amuck amidst a crowd of hapless moviegoers. 

Smarter than it had any expectation of being, technically proficient and disarmingly humanistic, The Blob ranks high among the great horror remakes of the 1980s; David Cronenberg’s The Fly, Paul Schrader’s Cat People and John Carpenter’s The Thing. Like those films, Russell’s updates not just the performances and effects, but the social issues that have always been the foundation in the stories we tell ourselves about our fear. The Blob is incredibly fun, but it’s also a rebuke of the Eisenhower-era nostalgia for a nuclear family and a notion of “normalcy” and law-and-order being pushed by conservative leadership. The government is involved in world-destroying chicanery and the cover-up of the same. The Church is fanatical and angling for the apocalypse; and the police is a bumbling sideshow of self-dealing, pernicious lack of intelligence and training, a thing that makes everything worse without making anything better. The popular guys in high school either peak early or are miscreants interested mainly in date rape, and the young women who are the victims of these jerks are too seldom allowed to demonstrate the full range of their resourcefulness and rage.

It’s as fleet and vicious as a slap across the face, but it’s also hilarious. Consider the hero moment for Meg when she plants a satchel of explosives on a few tanks of liquid nitrogen, delivers a cool catchphrase, and then gets her foot tangled in a hose and knocks herself out against the side of a truck. The Blob never takes itself very seriously as it delivers a full payload of imaginative gore and a defiant punk middle-finger to the establishment. The only thing that could make it any better is the original film’s last line in which a letter-sweater’d Steve McQueen says they’ll be safe so long as the arctic (where they’re sending the frozen monster) stays cold. Meant as a “when Hell freezes over” wisecrack, the arctic is melting quickly in 2022. Let’s hope we get a sequel before the oceans drown us all.

Walter Chaw is the Senior Film Critic for filmfreakcentral.net. His book on the films of Walter Hill, with introduction by James Ellroy, is now available for pre-order. His monograph for the 1988 film MIRACLE MILE is available now.