Michael's Halloween Lase-O-Rama: The Blob (1988, Criterion)

in #film4 years ago (edited)

TheBlob.jpg

Source: LDDB.com


A meteorite crashes to earth on the outskirts of a small Pennsylvania town. A nearby resident (Olin Howland) goes to investigate, and finds an odd, pitted chunk of rock which splits open when prodded with a stick. Inside is a special delivery from Hell: an amorphous glob of purple jelly which attaches itself to the old man's hand.

Lucky for him, a couple of teenagers named Steve and Jane (Steve McQueen and Aneta Corsaut) out for a bit of smooch-play in a nearby lovers' lane saw the meteor go down and drive over to investigate. Finding the man staggering around in the road, moaning in pain, the pair bundle him into Steve's car and drive him over to the local doctor's office, hoping to catch Dr. Hallen (Stephen Chase) before he closes the clinic for the night.

Doc Hallen's mystified by the bizarre organism, which has grown larger since Steve first saw it. He sends Steve and Jane back out to where they found the man to see if they can turn up anything, then calls in his nurse to prep the old man for surgery. But the organism has continued to grow. By the time the nurse arrives, it's devoured the old man. It then corners her in the clinic room and consumes her as well, then goes after the doctor. Steve and Jane get back in time to see a panicked Hallen, flailing madly, grabbing at the window blinds as he's absorbed. They rush to the police station, but the cops on duty think Steve's playing a prank on them since Steve was busted earlier in the evening for drag racing. Jane insists they take a trip up to the doctor's office and take a look around, but when they get there, there's no sign of Doc Hallen, his nurse, or the alien amoeba. Now free to roam unchecked, the amorphous mass makes its way to town and a wholesale slaughter ensues. But if no one believes Jane or Steve about the danger, how can the pair possibly stop the menace posed by the Blob?


Only in the 50's could a movie like The Blob have launched the career of Steve McQueen by casting the 28-year old in the role of a hot-rodding teenager named "Steve". Shot not on a Hollywood back lot, or even anywhere in California, this quirky, off-beat alien invasion story was produced independently out in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania on a budget of just over $100,000, with much of that going to the special effects work that makes it so memorable to this day.

The classic The Blob originally debuted in 1956 with the black-and-white not-so-classic I Married a Monster from Outer Space as part of a drive-in double-bill feature aimed at the newly-burgeoning teenage movie-going audience. While Monster is a conceptual retread of 1953's Invasion of the Body Snatchers and thus remains a relatively forgotten piece of period cinema, The Blob was a wholly original creature feature starring an antagonist about as far removed from iconic monsters like Frankenstein, King Kong, and the Creature From the Black Lagoon as Earth was from the extra-terrestrial origins of the killer jelly, and its popularity exploded far beyond the anticipation of anyone involved in its production. McQueen himself, assuming the film wouldn't make any money at the box office, turned down an offer that would have paid him less money up-front in exchange for 10% of its royalties, and thus earned $3,000 on a picture which grossed over four million dollars in 1956 money. It's probably not the most expensive mistake anybody's ever made in the acting business, but it had suck knowing you lost out on a $397,000 payday because your rent was coming due and you needed the money now.

But don't feel too bad for him. By 1974, McQueen was the single highest-paid movie star in the world, thanks to starring roles in films like The Towering Inferno, Papillon, and The Magnificent Seven. His ship still came in, and he made out just fine.

I absolutely love The Blob, all 80-ish glorious Deluxe Color minutes of it, from the quirky Burt Bacharach and Mack David-penned opening theme "Beware of the Blob" (which will earworm you like a Ceti Eel from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan) to the camp acting and generally unreal plot. McQueen is way to old to be playing a kid, but somehow that's just part of its charm. It's a story with top-notch effects for the time period, and there's something suitably menacing about a creature which exists only to eat things and grow larger, with which it is impossible to bargain, reason, or communicate. And while this couldn't have been predicted in the 1950's, the ending which sees the creature isolated and frozen solid at the North Pole takes on a suitable menace of its own today as Steve tells us everything will be fine, "so long as the Arctic stays cold." Here we are sixty years later, in a world beset by climate change, where disappearing Arctic ice and warming ocean temperatures paint a far grimmer ending than the whimsical, "The End?" postulated by the film's closing shot.

What's even more interesting from a cultural perspective is how The Blob subverted audience expectations. In the vernacular of 1950's cinema, teenagers were basically a sub-category of bad guy. Hollywood postulated you couldn't trust a teenager, because they were the rule-breakers: drag racing, breaking curfew, cruising, doing drugs and heavens only knows what else away from adult supervision. They menaced the adults in their lives with criminal activity, pregnancy, delinquency, defiance of authority, and smoking anything and everything to get a rush. Films like 1958's High School Confidential!, 1936's Reefer Madness, and 1955's The Blackboard Jungle all did their part to prove to the squeamish straights that the children were definitely not alright.

And if The Blob had played into this trope, it would have been perfectly understandable. In fact, it starts off looking like it just might do that: the movie opens with Steve and Jane kissing in Steve's car while parked out in the countryside. A few minutes later, Steve is speeding through the town to get to the doctor's office; not long after that, he agrees to drag race another group of kids out joyriding and gets busted by the cops for doing it.

But the twist comes as the story slowly turns Steve into the hero. He's the guy who knows what's really going on, who tries to rally the adults in the town, who eventually convinces a group of his peers that they need to get the word out. It isn't adults who figure out the Blob's weakness, it's Steve who realizes that it didn't follow him and Jane into the freezer because it can't stand the cold. It's Steve who notices the fire extinguisher scares it. And it's a bunch of teenagers who hot-rod over to the school to pick up enough fire extinguishers to freeze the thing solid.

Here was an anomaly of the 50's, a movie where kids were the heroes and adults were the blockheads who just didn't get it. Considering this was made for a teenage drive-in demographic, it's not hard to see why audiences flocked to it in droves. For kids of the era, this was seen as a movie which "got" them, which understood them, and which spoke to them without being condescending. It didn't matter that Steve McQueen was too old to be one of them in real life -- he embodied everything about what it meant to be one of them on the screen, and that's what counted.

That's pretty damn cool.


"The Criterion Collection" is to cinema what the Dubai First Royal MasterCard is to credit cards: the supreme authority to which all other authorities pay lip service and homage. This 1988 LaserDisc release was the sixty-fifth film to receive the Criterion treatment, which included a top-notch picture and audio transfer stuck from the original prints, presented in the intended 1.66:1 theatrical aspect ratio. It's a fine-looking picture, with rich shadows and vibrant colors, released on a single two-sided CLV-format 'disc. Both the Analog and Digital tracks offer the original mono theatrical mix, and they both sound great (at least, I couldn't detect any glaring differences when I swapped back and forth).

As far as special features go, this one's pretty light, with only the original theatrical trailer, plus the trailer for the 1988 remake, which are the last two chapters on the disc's second side. The Blob didn't get the full Criterion treatment until the label released a DVD version in 2000, which came complete with a commentary track recorded by four people involved with the film's production, including actor Robert Fields who played Tony Gressette, one of the teens Steve recruits to help him battle the Blob.

As such, it's hard to recommend this 'disc unless you just want a copy of The Blob on an old analog format. Being a Criterion pressing, it's fairly expensive on the second-hand market, and if you're going to drop $30+ on a film, you might as well get the DVD or Blu-Ray instead. But for dorks like myself and @janenightshade (who, I'm sure, has LOTS to say about this one!), The Blob is The Blob, and you really can't go wrong with it as a Halloween choice no matter what format you're viewing it on.

Five engulfed theater patrons out of five!


"Starring Steve McQueen...and a cast of exciting young people!"

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