A mysterious creature from another planet, resembling a giant blob of jelly, lands on earth. The people of a nearby small town refuse to listen to some teenagers who have witnessed the blob's destr...
The Blob visually impresses with its gelatinous effects despite the mucilaginous acting and script. “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”. All creature features should introduce its contents with a disposable encouraging novelty song, even if the melodic lyrics tonally mismatch the horrors that await. It acts as a stark reminder that B-movies, particularly creature features from the 50s, were equipped with theatrical buoyancy and menacing titular monsters. The type of film one would’ve experienced at a drive-in screening.
Yeaworth’s independently produced sci-fi horror, originally part of a double feature with Fowler Jr.’s ‘I Married a Monster From Outer Space’, exploits the audience’s cravings for simple creature feature shenanigans in a decade where disposable “teen movies” were released nearly every month. It’s not a succinct piece of art. Nor does it withhold dramatic prowess. It’s a B-movie, revolving around an alien amoeboidal substance that crash lands on Earth, encased in a meteorite. The extraterrestrial then starts to devour its victims by dissolving their flesh, where it increasingly grows in size before attempting to engulf the entire town of Phoenixville in its blood red blobbiness.
First and foremost, the titular entity itself. The Blob. Surprisingly menacing. The reason being is due to its inability to possess a personality. Many creature features of this kind tend to perpetuate a sympathetic undertone that forces viewers to climactically empathise with the beast, usually culminating in some sort of underdeveloped love story with the damsel in distress. This, well, it’s just a Blob. It does not communicate. It does not think. It simply devours all things fleshy. The viscosity that oozes from its slimy movement, edited ingeniously through quick cuts whilst occasionally superimposed on the film frame itself, created an amoeboid of horror with incredibly limited detail. Just from the minimal scenes of human dissolution alone, the alien’s corrosive abilities and aggressive behaviour can be conveyed. Harnessing an annihilatory primitivity that enhances its imbuing terror. Accompanied by an authentic score that heightens its menacing demeanour and noteworthy cinematography from Spalding, and The Blob becomes a technical marvel that still holds up well today.
The overtly gooeyness of Linaker and Simonson’s script however, is what corrodes this infectious creature feature. Whilst it proceeds with a consistent narrative pace, opting to focus on “deluded” teenagers consistently being ignored by their adult counterparts, the dialogue overcompensates for the lack of Blob-time. Most of the runtime, the characters were questioning amongst themselves “Where is it? We need to find it before it kills everyone?” instead of shifting the focus onto the amoeboid itself. Understandably, the budget was excruciatingly small, however a creature feature’s main star should not be its human characters but the creature itself. Unfortunately, not the case here. Towards the phoney ending line of dialogue, instigating the rise in global warming before cutting to a visible question mark, you’re left yearning for some more blobby goodness.
Steve Andrews, the protagonist seventeen-year old played by Steve McQueen whom was actually twenty-seven at the time (yeah, it doesn’t work...), failed to exude a personality. Aside from the police officers, none of the supporting characters had any memorability to them. Sure, the cheesy acting that one could find in a TV advertisement is partly to blame, yet the superfluous dialogue to pad out the film’s runtime also holds responsibility. Cut ten minutes of McQueen and Corseaut racing down the street in reverse or investigating the recently dissolved doctor’s office out and the horror overtone could’ve remained.
The Blob may not be within the top echelon of drive-in creature features, yet it is abundantly obvious how influential this B-movie was for future horror films. Its silent but viciously deadly titular amoeboid would pave the way for expressionless antagonists to reap the innocent souls of humanity. No love story. No expensive visual effects. Just good ol’ fashioned disposable monster fun.
