Today we review The Blob! No not my midsection, the movie from the 80’s!

A mysterious space object falls to earth in the sleepy mountain town of Arborville, CA. When a dirty hobo, I’m sorry, unwashed unhoused individual, stumbles upon the resulting crater, he is attacked by a formless gelatinous substance. When the town’s cliché love triangle finds him, the Football player, cheerleader, and motorcycle bad boy take the filthy degenerate, sorry cleanliness-divergent individual experiencing homelessness, to the hospital.

There the gelatinous substance quickly consumes several townspeople and becomes, you guessed it, THE GLOB!

The Blob is one of those movies that I watch and truly don’t understand why it’s not lauded more. With a disrespectful 69% on rotten tomatoes, people may not realize that this is a well crafted monster tale that rivals The Thing and Tremors. 

Director Chuck Russell and the young Frank Darabond, who had just come off a successful collaboration A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, show their skill here. The plot features an impressive number of satisfying setups and payoff throughout. There is an excellent mixture of action, horror, and humor throughout that should satisfy fans of any of those genres.

The most impressive feature of the film is the practical effects that convincingly portray a formless blob as a real menace. Where the original 50s blob looked like strawberry jelly mashed through miniatures and settling in stationary positions, this 80s incarnation whips out tentacles, surrounds, and digests people with alarming speed. The intention of Russel and Darabond was to portray the blob as an inside out stomach, consuming all it touches, and they convincingly created it through a variety of stop motion, puppetry, and miniature work.

It’s a corny monster premise, somehow made actually terrifying by showing, not telling what the monster can do.

It’s not deep, but it’s a lot of fun.

10/10