The 1988 Remake of The Blob is Shockingly Scary for a Movie About Angry, Evil Jell-O
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
I’m fortunate in that readers sometimes choose films for Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 that I desperately want to see. Watching Chuck Russell’s 1989 directorial debut Nightmare on Elm Street 3: The Dream Warriors and watching Never Sleep Again, an exhaustive, nearly five-hour-long documentary about Wes Craven’s brainchild, left me with a strong desire to see Russell’s 1988 follow-up The Blob.
Like A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, The Blob offers a new take on a popular pop culture monster. In A Nightmare on Elm Street, the central ghoul is, of course, Freddy Krueger. In The Blob, the menace is the titular extraterrestrial menace, a rampaging force the color of Pepto Bismol.
In the 1958 original, the titular monster was an emissary from outer space. In a remake released three decades later, the blob was created as a biological weapon that turned monstrous and rapacious when it interacted with radiation in outer space.
The sinister government experiment returns home via a meteorite that lands in an idyllic small town in California. A homeless man makes first contact. He pays for it with his life when the killer goo gets stuck on his hand.
Johnny Drama, the early years.
The hobo is taken to the hospital by a trio of teens—cheerleader Megan "Meg" Penny (Shawnee Smith), football player Paul Taylor (Donovan Leitch), and insouciant rebel Brian Flagg (Kevin Dillon).
The best that can be said of Dillon’s lead performance is that it is good enough. Kevin Dillon is the archetypal less talented younger brother. He’s a lesser sibling in his most famous role, as Johnny Drama in Entourage, and in real life.
Kevin Dillon won’t make anyone forget Matt Dillon here, let alone Steve McQueen, the star of the original. The Blob would benefit from a stronger lead, but if I might give the actor faint praise, he is ragingly adequate as a bad boy faced with a threat beyond his feeble imagination.
Before the Blob can begin feasting upon the small town's residents, we are first introduced to the inhabitants of Arborville, California. They’re the kind of Norman Rockwellesque, salt-of-the-earth types that cynical conservative politicians consider real Americans.
There’s Jeffrey DeMunn as Sheriff Herb Geller, a genial lawman with a crush on Fran Hewitt (Candy Clark), a pretty waitress who works at a diner, as well as Reverend Meeker, a demented man of God played by improv legend Del Close in one of his most substantial film roles.
The homeless man who first saw and felt the blob loses the lower half of his body to the sinister ooze. Paul is next. The blob proves a formidable foe. It’s not the angry, evil Jell-O of the original but rather something fast, adaptive, and seemingly unstoppable.
The blob consumes everything that it encounters. It is an acidic parasite that turns flesh, muscle, and bone into bright pink goo.
This is not your daddy’s blob. It’s a Lovecraftian monster with a rapacious hunger that absorbs and destroys everything it encounters.
The result is Cronenbergian body horror as the poor residents of an archetypal American town become one with the blob. That’s appropriate since The Blob was shot by Mark Irwin, whose other credits include Scanners, Videodrome, The Dead Zone (which was released the same year as Videodrome, oddly and impressively enough), and The Fly.
Brian and Meg emerge as the movie’s male and female leads. Meg represents conformity, while Brian exemplifies the teenage urge to rebel.
I expected The Blob to be far campier than it turns out to be. The small town where it all goes down is sketched in broad terms, but once the secret ooze begins wracking up a body count, The Blob becomes a shockingly scary and effective horror movie.
To his credit, Russell never gives us a chance to get used to its titular villain, let alone get bored with it. Instead of moving slowly and deliberately, the blob sneaks up on its victims and strikes without mercy.
News of this ghoul without a body reaches a government that has a vested interest in solving a problem that it caused. When you are manufacturing death to anonymous enemies, you cannot be surprised when your handiwork comes back to haunt you.
The Blob is stylized like a 1950s throwback but the agents of the government look like emissaries from a science-fiction dystopia.
Joe Seneca is riveting as Dr. Christopher Meddows, the subtly sinister government goon tasked with containing a Cold War weapon gone murderously awry. He’s a hard-headed pragmatist with ice-water in his veins who is absolutely fine with people dying when it suits his interests.
Unfortunately for our hero and heroine, Dr. Meddows is more than willing to sacrifice them for the greater good.
Brian escapes on a motorcycle in a scene that would be several thousand times cooler and more iconic if it involved Steve McQueen, who called his favorite motorcycle The Blob, rather than Matt Dillion AND Vinnie Chase’s mildly embarrassing brother.
In The Blob, the government is not your friend. It’s not here to protect you. It does not care about you. It cares only about itself and its needs.
Like other horror films of this era, The Blob depicts the government as sinister, shadowy, and obsessed with keeping secrets from a populace it does not hold in high regard.
Russell got off to a roaring start as a horror filmmaker with A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors and The Blob. He would go on to become a filmmaker of note in different genres. In 1994, he helped catapult Jim Carrey to superstardom as the director of The Mask, in which he channeled Frank Tashlin instead of Wes Craven. He also directed the spectacularly silly and satisfying 1996 Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle Eraser, in which the action hero famously shot an alligator while quipping, “You’re luggage!”
He returned to horror, after a fashion, with 2000’s Bless the Child, which I have written about for my autism in entertainment column. Bless the Child is as insulting and unsatisfying as a horror movie as it is a tasteless take on life on the autism spectrum.
The veteran filmmaker’s most recent film is a remake of the 1986 cult classic Witchboard. That does not sound promising, but Russell wrote the script in addition to directing, and the film has a 100 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes. That’s rare for any horror film, particularly a remake of a movie that wasn’t exactly a critical hit.
I’ll have to find an excuse to watch Witchboard because Russell has a sure hand when it comes to horror, so it will be interesting to see if his most recent fright flick fulfills the ample promise of his first two directorial outings.
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