The Blob
HORROR-THON 2020 • POD PEOPLE
8.5/10
DIRECTOR: Irvin S. Yeaworth Jr. & Russell Doughten
STARRING: Steve McQueen, Aneta Corseaut
RELEASED: 1958
RUNTIME: 1 hour 26 minutes
WATCH ON: HBO Max, Criterion Channel
SCARE LEVEL: Zero
FUN LEVEL: High. Watch it with snacks you don’t mind looking at afterward.
The villain of this movie is a puddle. A red, slow, gelatinous puddle that looks like someone knocked a vat of raspberry jam off a truck. It still manages to eat half a Pennsylvania town. I respect the hustle.
A meteor crashes outside a small town. Naturally, an old man pokes it with a stick (classic mistake), and the good inside latches onto his hand and won’t let go. Teenagers Steve and Jane find him on the road and drive him to the local doctor. The doctor, the nurse, and the old man all end up as blob food.
-
Steve spends the right of the night trying to convince the police, his friends, and his girlfriend’s dad that a killer jelly is loose. Nobody believes him. Meanwhile the blob keeps eating, and it gets bigger and redder every time. It his a movie theater during a midnight spook show and sends the entire audience sprinting into the street. Then it swallows a diner with Steve and Jane trapped inside.
Steve notices that the blob backs away from a CO2 fire extinguisher. Cold is its weakness. The town’s teenagers raid the high school for every extinguisher they can carry, freeze the thing solid, and the Air Force flies it to the Arctic.
The last line is “as long as the Arctic stays cold.” In 1958, that was meant to be comforting.
MY HUMBLE OPINION
Steve McQueen was 27 and playing a high schooler. He literally looks like he pays a mortgage. I’m aware every teen movie does this, but this one has zero shame about it. Now the theme song. It’s called “Beware of the Blob,” Burt Bacharach co-wrote it, and it sounds like a doo-wop group got hired for the wrong movie. It plays during the opening credits, and it will get stuck in your head for a century.
The movie works because it commits to the absurd. The blob oozing under a door, swallowing a projection booth, and somehow wrapping itself around an entire diner like Saran Wrap. The shots are ridiculous, they know it, and I loved every one of them. The parts that drag are honestly the adults refusing to believe Steve over and over. We get it. Nobody trusts teenagers.
Fun Fact for your next dinner party
The actual Blob was a mixture of red dye and silicone, and has never dried out. It’s still kept in the original five-gallon pail it was shipped to the production company in 1958. It was put on display over the years as Phoenixville, PA’s annual Blobfest.