The Blob (1958)

Film: The Blob (1958)
Stars: Steve McQueen, Aneta Corseaut, Earl Rowe, Olin Howland, Stephen Chase
Director: Irvin Yeaworth
Oscar History: Never nominated
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

This month we are devoting all of our classic film reviews to Golden Age Horror films that I saw for the first time this year.  If you want to take a look at past titles (from this and other seasons of this series), look at the bottom of the page for links.

We are winding down our month devoted to Classic Horror with Halloween fast approaching, and have reached our penultimate movie this week.  The drive-in monster movies of the 1950's have not survived in the same sense as the Universal Horror films, especially of the early-1930's.  While the Lugosi & Karloff pictures have developed a famous, almost mythic place in Hollywood lore, the films of the 1950's feel campy, and are more-related to something you'd see at 2 AM on cable than you would get in a deluxe Blu-Ray package.  Which made the history of The Blob fascinating to me.  This is a movie that should, by all accounts, have ended up in the annals of camp classics, and in many ways it has, but it's also gotten some prestige treatment in the years since that defy its less-than-auspicious roots.  It has been released in a Criterion package, and it's one of the few monster movies of this era with a new creation that is easily name-checked if you're listing horror movie icons (we've all heard of "the Blob").  And, perhaps most surprising if all you know of it is the title, it stars one of the biggest actors of the 1960's in his feature film debut, Steve McQueen.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is centered around Steve (McQueen) and Jane (Corsaut), his girlfriend who while making out in his convertible see a meteorite crash in the distance.  When they drive to see what it is, they come across an old man (Howland) who is covered in some sort of gelatinous goo, and appears to be in great pain.  They take him to Dr. Hallen (Chase), who is stumped, but soon realizes that the goo is expanding into a Blob, and killing the old man.  Soon, the Blob has killed Dr. Hallen, and both Jane & Steve are running around the town, trying to convince the police that they aren't pulling a prank, and that the Blob is real; it keeps escaping before they can prove its existence to the "adults" (I say that in quotes because McQueen is pushing thirty in this film and looks it).  Eventually the Blob expands to the point where no one can deny it as it attacks the movie theater, and then a diner where Steve & Jane are.  In the diner, Steve realizes that the Blob is vulnerable to cold, and soon fights off the Blob, with the Blob being put in the Arctic to stay frozen & docile (yet another problem we're going to have because we ignored climate change).

The film is not flexing a lot of intellectual muscle.  It wasn't intended to be a hit when it came out (it was the B-movie to I Married a Monster from Outer Space until demand for The Blob bumped it to top billing for the double-feature), and there's very little to the plot other than a repetitive cat-and-mouse game with the blob, the adults, and the teens.  The creature and the effects of the film, even in 1958, felt a bit cheesy, & the acting is not something you'd brag about; while McQueen would go on to become an iconic movie star, you'd be forgiven if you were a studio chief watching this movie at the time & describing the actor as "handsome but flat."

Yet there is something here-I get why it became a classic.  The color photography for a horror film feels authentic & interesting.  Yes, it's cheesy, but the monster is kind of fascinating-it changes color throughout the film, making it almost seem (to a modern audience) like it's expressing mood or feeling, and thus isn't "just a blob."  It's bad, but it has strange parables to some of the scare tactics of the 1950's (in this case, no one believes the threat, which they assume is imaginary, until it's too late...which in hindsight reads as the reverse of some of the Red Scare), and while it's drier than it should be (I'd like more camp), it's a fun movie, to the point where I get why it was a hit with drive-in crowds.

Past Horror Month Reviews (Listed Chronologically): The Golem, The Phantom of the Opera, Dracula, Frankenstein, Freaks, The Mummy, The Old Dark House, The Invisible Man, The Black Cat, The Bride of Frankenstein, Mad Love, Werewolf of London, Son of Frankenstein, The Invisible Man Returns, The Mummy's Hand, The Wolf Man, Cat People, The Ghost of Frankenstein, The Mummy's Tomb, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, The House of Frankenstein, House of Dracula, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man, It Came from Outer Space, Creature from the Black Lagoon, Revenge of the Creature, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Masque of the Red Death