The Blob (1988)

There are countless remakes of classic horror movies, and most of them are garbage. Mostly made for a quick buck to capitalise on the popularity of a known franchise, remakes and reboots of horror films tend to turn out badly. They rely on nostalgia, offering very little in terms of improvement, originality or quality. The remakes of Nightmare on Elm Street and Halloween, for example, were torturous garbage that lacked in just about every aspect. 

Good remakes are possible though. Sometimes a new coat of paint can lend itself well to a remake, such as Evil Dead’s remake or Amityville Horror. The Blob is one such remake. It takes the general idea from the original film and plays with it, both updating it for new audiences and being more creative with the details. It doesn’t change the world or shake things up as much as some of the great remakes (like John Carpenter’s The Thing or David Cronenberg’s The Fly) but it excels where many remakes fail by being highly entertaining.

The plot is simple. A meteorite lands in the woods just outside of a small American town, unleashing the blob. At first a small gelatinous mass, the blob consumes people and grows in size, making its way through town and consuming everyone that crosses paths with it. Two teens, Brian and Megan, are the first to realise the danger and try to warn others and survive. Things are further complicated with the appearance of shady military men wearing biohazard suits and brandishing machine guns lurking in the woods, who quickly quarantine the town.  The plot isn’t particularly important for this sort of film, but it gets the job done right. The characters themselves are pretty ordinary, but that's fine since you're here for the Blob, and you really do get what you came for. 

The Blob is gory as fuck. That’s one major improvement over the original I’m all for. The blob doesn’t just engulf you, it digests you, melting through flesh and bone and dissolving everything it swallows. This leads to some impressively gruesome imagery. Limbs fall off, faces are melted, bodies are torn apart – this is an expertly gory film that doesn’t skimp on the nastiness. The blob itself is aggressive as hell, furiously assaulting fleeing survivors so it can ingest them. It has a measure of intelligence and malleability, capable of stretching out in tentacles to reach through drains and vents. While the effects are really good for the most part, some choppy effects work does shows up as the blob increases in size. While the smaller versions were brought to life with fantastic prop-work, the larger ones tend to involve CGI trickery which doesn’t look particularly convincing.

This is a very pulpy movie that isn’t afraid to have fun with the ridiculousness of it all. An explanation is given for the blob that’s just as silly as you’d expect it to be. Pulpy and silly are two words that really sum up the movie, and make it a really fun time. That being said, sometimes the silliness lends itself to unintentional humour. When people show up dead with their bodies melted and their arms severed, the police instantly arrest town delinquent Brian, seemingly because he rides a motorcycle and doesn’t obey the rules. The military try to stop the Blob by shooting at it with handguns (despite already knowing that bullets and explosions don’t work).

The only real problems I have with the film are in the smaller details. The main issue I have is that, for the first two thirds of the film at least, the town feels oddly empty. The streets are bare, the buildings are empty and the town feels deserted at times. While this might be because the focus on Brian and Megan takes us to places where other people aren’t necessarily around (like back alleys, the woods, the sewer), it still feels odd that it takes so long for anybody to realise the blob is killing people on the streets, or that the military has quarantined the entire town. This all changes for the finale, with dozens of people on the street fleeing in terror, but for most of the movie there doesn’t seem to be all that many people around. Another complaint is that the movie also ends on a really odd note, not keeping with the tone of the rest of the movie.

The Blob remake is a really fun time, easily improving on the original through sheer spectacle and thrills. It has some impressive gore, some decent effects work and is genuinely the best movie about a giant gelatinous blob you could hope for.