Director: Chuck Russell
Written by: Chuck Russell & Frank Darabont
Starring: Kevin Dillon, Shawnee Smith, Donovan Leitch, Jeffrey DeMunn, Art LaFleur, Bill Moseley, Erika Eleniak
Music by: Michael Hoenig
Taglines: “Scream now, while there’s still room to breathe.”"Terror has no shape.”"If it had a mind, you could reason with it. If it had a face, you could look it in the eye. And if it had a body, you could shoot it.”"On his 30th birthday, he’s back: bigger, faster, hungrier, meaner and deadlier than before…Guess he’ll have his cake and eat it too.”
STORY
Kevin Dillon is Brian Flagg, a misunderstood punk teenager with some attitude problems and constantly gets in trouble with the law, though he’s really a good kid. After the latest argument, he decides to
Meanwhile, a meteorite hits on the far side of town. The farmer who finds it pokes it with a stick, only to have his arm attacked and slowly dissolved by a viscous, yet alive, liquid blob within the meteorite. Dillon finds him and takes him to hospital but the blob, which grows bigger and hungrier with each new victim, kills the doctor and escapes. It’s now a race against time to destroy the seemingly unstoppable blob – not an easy task when nobody in town believes you and your friends are the ones being picked off…
OPINION
The original version of The BlobThe Blob was a low-budget 50s masterpiece. It was cheesy and exciting, the poor special effects and hilarious acting (the lead teenager was played by the then-unknown Steve McQueen, then nearly 30 years old) was offset by a feeling of genuine charm, some scary sequences and an imaginative script. Many movies have borrowed from the classic structure of the plot, ranging from innumerable 50s b-movies to Killer Klowns From Outer Space and beyond.
As you might be able to guess from the above plot synopsis, the plot generally follows the outline of the first movie for the first half of the movie. It should also come as no surprise that the effects are much better this time around. While it’s certainly possible to spot the joins, and a few effects are a bit silly (the guy who gets sucked into a sink’s plughole, for example), the effects are mostly gruesomely realistic depictions of people getting dissolved, absorbed and eaten alive.
Dillon plays the McQueen role, and does pretty well as the disaffected teenager desperately trying to get the attention of disbelieving authority figures before taking matters into his own hands. The rest of the cast do pretty well, and this is one of those remakes that does everything perfectly, recreating scenes from the first movie, throwing in curve balls to surprise fans while never betraying the fun spirit of the original.
That is, until a twist about 2/3 of the way through… Now, you can skip the rest of this review if you don’t want the movie spoiled (and it is definitely worth watching), but to my mind it seems so silly that it comes close to ruining a fine film (IMHO at least).
The twist is that this particular incarnation of the blob is not an alien creature but rather a failed government genetic experiment. This leads to a rather silly climax, where Dillon has to try and save the town from corrupt government spooks who would destroy the town rather than lose their valuable biological weapon. It’s a silly cold war-era twist, and makes the same mistake that many slasher remakes and sequels have done – explaining too much. The blob was fine when you assumed that it was an alien lifeform, and the military explanation adds nothing. It’s a shame, as this was a great movie for me up until that point, but it did lose me.
However, it’s still very enjoyable, and it has an interesting pedigree. Not only do we have the aforementioned Dillon (now possibly best known for Entourage), but we have early roles from Saw’s Shawnee Smith, Baywatch’s Erika Eleniak and even “Chop Top” himself Mosley (here after his cult-defining role in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2). the talent’s not lacking behind the camera either. Russell had already directed A Nightmare on Elm Street 3 – Dream Warriors (one of the best in my, and many others’ opinions) and went on to a fair Hollywood career with the likes of The Mask. Darabont, now well-regarded for his Stephen King adaptations, had co-written the Freddy film and shares the writing credit with Russell, among others. Just another example of the fertile ground that 80s genre could be, and why it’s a shame that TV rather than this kind of fare was the breeding ground for the current mainstream generation.
Rating: 
[...] imagined, what we get is an uneven spoof of consumerist culture combined with a kind of melding of The Blob and Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Had I known the name Larry Cohen as well then as I do now, I [...]
Hope to see a copy on this film. I am fascinated after reading the review.