REVIEW: The Blob (Chuck Russell, 1988)

Sci-fi camp silliness gets less of an upgrade and more of a sidegrade in Chuck Russell's The Blob, which reworks the fifties drive-in "classic" for the eighties, keeping the basic premise while injecting post-Vietnam government paranoia, post-AIDS pathophobia, and post-Bottin creature effects.  The stew of ideas and imagery proves less fruitful than expected, and the majority of The Blob plays too comfortably as a standard creature-feature.  What's here is formula, well-wrought but absent of personality, about as thoughtful as its titular beast.  The film isn't bad, but with this much potential, it really should be better.

I don't want to live in a world where people don't poke meteors with sticks.

The original film's template serves the remake well.  Object falls from space.  Homeless man unwisely pokes object from space, reveals space-goo.  Space-goo inside object goes on human-absorption rampage.  Plucky teens stop threat.  Director Russell and co-writer Frank Darabont add a subplot about villainous hazmat-suited scientists who quarantine the small town, and I have to wonder, is a horror film ever going to make the observation that quarantining a small town to save the world might be the smart, reasonable thing to do?  George Romero or Larry Cohen would attack that concept with zeal, blurring lines and challenging us with the full implications of the story's elements.  Chuck Russell has no such ambitions.

"So it's agreed - we'll be both vaguely threatening and laughably ineffectual."

Instead, he focuses on cutout characters like juvenile delinquent Brian (Kevin Dillon) and smiley cheerleader Meg (Shawnee Smith), who discover that, like in the first film, the Blob can't stand the cold.  You'd think that if all the animals we've documented have multiple vulnerabilities, so would the Blob, but cinema beasts always have exactly one vulnerability, so their weakness can be dramatically exposed and exploited in the final reel.  It's just the way these things have to go.  To say more about these two teenagers would assume that their lives in-film involve much more than reactive stares and screams and breathless explications of plot.  So I won't say more.

Sewers this big in a small town?  How unrealistic.

I will, however, commend special effects supervisor Tony Gardner (Return of the Living Dead, Nightbreed), who brings a terrific amount of squelchy, gruey disgusterrific scenes to life.  Like Carpenter's version of the Thing, the Blob can mutate endlessly, slithering and flowering and crystallizing as it chases after anyone in its path.  This beast is supposed to be an evocation of viruses and germs, and Gardner nails the macro-proto-plasmic look of the Blob, thanks to a savvy combination of rear-projection, stop-motion animation, and physical props and animatronics.  The stand-out sequence of the film, with someone stuck in a Hitchcockian phone booth while the Blob convincingly oozes down the sides, genuinely frightens.

She's about to either call the police or meet Napoleon.

Other sequences excite, like the heroes' escape from an unusually large sewer system, and the finale where the townspeople perform their best impression of Rio Bravo.  The Blob is an efficient film, to be sure, but, then again, it isn't much more.  The film lacks the sideways zingers and stealthy cheer of Tremors and Slither.  Apart from a few period details (Kevin Dillon's Samson-esque power mullet), the film lacks idiosyncrasy.  It's an acceptable tread through familiar terrain.  Then again, is that a bad thing?  Can't this just be a slight-if-satisfying monster movie?  Then again, why bother remaking a film if there's no passion?  The Fly, The Thing, Cat People, and Invasion of the Body Snatchers all engaged the viewer on a number of levels.  By comparison, The Blob feels distant.

Then again, what does it mean, exactly, when I say that I think a movie about a ravenous blob of protoplasm is emotionally and intellectually unfulfilling?

RATING: B-