I knew when I committed myself to looking at schlocky 80s films for my horror movies this year that there would be a very good chance that I would eventually hit one that tested even my patience for crappy horror films. That movie, friends, is Chuck Russell’s 1988 remake of The Blob. At the best of times I’m not a fan of remaking films, especially horror films. But this film manages to get pretty much everything wrong with a remake that you can. The original film was a B movie at best. You’d think it would be ripe for a slick, more contemporary approach to the source material. No. It’s not.

What Russell gives us is a cast of pretty uniformly unlikeable characters. And while, in other circumstances, the film’s “anyone can die” approach would be a welcome change of pace, in this case you find yourself regretting that that some people actually live. The Blob itself changes from the rather aimless amorphous menace of the original film to something that displays a rudimentary intelligence. It can be angry, now. Which, frankly, is just fucking stupid. A certain degree of internal consistency is necessary for “scientific” monsters in horror movies. Yet this new Blob is small enough to sneak up on people, but big enough to engulf people whole. It’s fast enough to eat minor characters effortlessly, but slow enough that the heroes can get away from it. It can crawl up wall and ceilings…unless of course the heroes are climbing up a wall to get away from it. And, of course, it can grow tentacles to pull people through walls. When it wants to.
So basically what we have is a misguided revamp that largely misses the appeal of the original, but does amp up the gore factor considerably. We even get a rehash of the original film’s most iconic sequence, the Blob in the movie theater, transformed from something original into just another bloody killing spree.
Even the not-really-convincing arguments that the original Blob was a communism metaphor are taking horribly literally here, when the film-makers decide to give the Blob an origin. No, we can’t have it just be a menace from “outside” a perfect community. No, it has to be a government experiment to fight Communism gone wrong.
Urgh.

Here, listen to something less aggravatingly annoying Blob-related:

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This entry was posted on Monday, October 18th, 2010 at 12:01 AM and is filed under movies, Spooky Month. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.