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Date Posted: 12:44:40 06/30/01 Sat
Author: Griff
Subject: Beware of the Rich - he bores, and snores, and drones and moans... like my new Blob lyrics there? I'm gonna do a Shaft review a bit later but I'm going to bed for a couple of hours now, cos I'm all poorly.


THE BLOB


Spoilers!

Like the updates of The Fly and The Thing, this remake of the likeable 50s movie is probably best remembered for the more gruesome effects, the more graphic make-up and a more cynical edge than was present in the original. Underneath all that, and the predictable upping of the sex and bad language quotient, this Blob isn’t really all that far removed from its predecessor – it’s still kind of hokey, quite fun in a dullish sort of way and firmly entrenched in the paranoid monster-attacks-small-town mindset that ran throughout 50s SF.

Like the original, this begins with an old man discovering a meteor in the woods. A purple goo attaches itself to his hand and, before long, has become an enormous gelatinous mass that threatens to engulf the whole town. One of the most striking differences in the story is in its attitude to authority; whereas the teenagers and cops in the first one were best buds, here the anti-hero Brian (Kevin Dillon) is much more distrustful of them. Rather than the blob being an unknown goop from outer space, it turns out to be man-made, a biological weapon dreamt up by the double-crossing government agency who turn up in the town and claim to be there to help. It’s far less wide-eyed than the Steve McQueen model.

What’s probably the most successful aspect of the movie is the blob attacks themselves, which look fantastic. In the pre-CG era of the late 80s, it’s all done with rubber and goo and prosthetic effects, and not surprisingly it all looks a hundred times better than before. Of course blobby effects in themselves do not a movie make, so scripters Chuck Russell and Frank Darabont spring numerous surprises on us by being completely heartless with their victims. The movie pulls a Psycho on us early in the movie when Paul (Donovan Leitch), a character who’s been set up as the nominal hero, is blobbed to death in a doctor’s office.

Also, there’s a sweetly hesitant romance building between the town’s sheriff and the owner of the local diner, which comes to an abrupt halt when she sees his melted head blobbing past a phone booth just before the booth is crushed by the blob, swallowing her up. There really is no way of knowing which characters are going to survive, so the movie at least keeps you on the edge of your seat that way in the absence of any real suspense elsewhere. People you thought would stay the distance get blobbed and it’s quite shocking at times. But the main sticking point here is the pacing, which stops and starts all over the place; after each blob attack it all goes quiet and Paul and Meg (Shawnee Smith) prowl about for a while until the next one, and it becomes disappointingly tedious.

Top moments are probably one poor guy getting sucked head first down a plughole and Paul screaming while inside the blob, plus there are some funny lines (“Kevin, don’t eat with your face!”) and a cracking piss-take of slasher films when some kids sneak in to a horror movie (“It’s not hockey season!”). It’s a very hit and miss affair, dull in places, exciting in others. It never really makes the most of the story and ends up pretty much on a par with the original film. Still, let’s be thankful for small mercies: if this was made now it would probably be mangled by Devlin and Emmerich, full of ropey CG effects and feature a Will Smith cover of the Burt Bacharach theme song.



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