After listening to The Blob's theme song, the bounciest ditty ever recorded to commemorate a horror flick (sample lyric: "Beware of The Blob, it creeps/And leaps and glides and slides/Across the floor"), we meet Steve ("Steven" McQueen) and Jane (Aneta Corsaut), a couple of eighteen-year-olds preparing to enter a mature phase in their romance (he needs to stop calling her nicknames and start apologizing more often). 'Inspiration Point' is now a place for discussion, and it is there that they notice a distant falling object too big to be a shooting star. Meanwhile, an old man (Olin Howlin) leaves his cabin to check out said occurrence, only to discover a landed meteorite in his front yard. Naturally, he pokes and prods at it with a stick, but this ain't no harmless space debris: soon Howlin's arm is smothered in parasitic goo.
Steve and Jane later discover the senior wandering back-roads absent-mindedly and in excruciating pain, so they rush him to Dr. Hallen's (Stephen Chase) office. The bonesaw has never seen anything like this flesh-devouring slime, and doesn't find a solution in time; the patient becomes a gelatinous mass of red, absorbing Hallen and his nurse (Lee Payton), too, before oozing hungrily outside, growing bigger with each kill. Though Steve and Jane catch on faster than any of the town's other non-victims, convincing figures of authority--cops, parents--that an extraterrestrial shape is on the prowl proves frustrating for everybody involved, due to that longstanding distrust between kids and adults.
Believe it or not, a company of people who wanted to make religious films developed The Blob. The entrepreneurial Pennsylvanian distributor Jack H. Harris, prepared to finance something immediately, had this sci-fi project in mind for their first feature instead. The rest, as they say, is history. While The Blob is hardly a piece of spiritual propaganda, it does offer one of the most lesson-prone portrayals of youth in the 1950s this side of sex-ed shorts from the same era (fascinatingly chronicled, right down to Walt Disney's "The Story of Menstruation", by Ken Smith in his new-ish reference book, Mental Hygiene; Classroom Films: 1945-1970), and thusly makes for a curious hybrid of thrills and delinquency years prior to the birth of the slasher film. It seems to want to follow a single throughline, and then unable to resist checking in with another.
As you can see, the creators of The Blob rely on old-fashioned 'never cry wolf'-style morals to pad out their scenario, which in and of itself is quite exciting, considering that the villain here is faceless and unhasty. Eventually, elder and younger generations unite to defeat the title monster, with Jane's father (Elbert Smith), in a calculated moment of catharsis, forced to vandalize the high school where he teaches in order to assist the rescue of Steve. Who knows whether my counterfeit nostalgia for postwar suburbia according to Hollywood (I'm a devotee of "Leave It to Beaver") or a genuine affection for B-kitsch in its prime (flipsides of an identical coin, really) fuels my fascination with The Blob, but admire it I do. McQueen, tenaciously clinging to The Method, deserves plaudits for elevating the film's believability.
The Criterion Collection pays tribute to The Blob's place in popular culture with their latest Special Edition DVD, featuring a 1.66:1 letterboxed, 16x9-enhanced digital transfer mastered from the camera negative. Allowing for age-related idiosyncrasies in colour and wear, the disc sparkles. Although most of the action takes place at night, the characters generally interact under bright enough conditions that shadow detail--or lack thereof--never really becomes an issue. (Dark hair, however, does have a tendency to glow a solid, comedic shade of blue in scenes towards the climax.) Grain is minimal but accounted for.
The DVD's 1.0 mono sound is clean and resonant, and that equally describes the audio quality of two optional commentaries. On one track, director Irvin S. Yeaworth, Jr. and actor Robert ("I think I played 'Tony'") Fields offer fond recollections on the low-budget shoot, while producer Jack H. Harris chimes in from a businessman's perspective on the second track, alongside obscenely prepared film historian Bruce Eder. (Criterion has indexed these rap sessions separate from the scene selection menu according to topic, a practice I would love to see the major studios adopt. Want to know how McQueen was cast? Skip straight to the relevant anecdote.) Finally, the original theatrical trailer, annotated stills of "Blob-abilia", liner notes by Bruce Kawin, and a poster insert render Criterion's package out of this world.
A shapless lifeform from a fallen meteor is feeding off the unsuspecting inhabitants of a small town. It is up to a teenage couple to warn their neigh...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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