The Blob (1958) Review- By Michael J. Carlisle

Title: The Blob
Year: 1958
Director: Irvin S. Yeaworth
Country: US
Language: English

By the late 50's, monsters from outer space were firmly established in movies. The popularity of Universal Studio's classic monsters from the 30's (Dracula, Frankenstein, Wolfman) enticed major studios to create serious big-budget horror/sci-fi pictures like Howard Hawks The Thing From Another World  and Robert Wise's The Day the Earth Stood Still. Unlike Wise's picture, The Blob was made in glorious color, to show off the slimy oozing gelatinous title creature. The film wasn't expected to make much due to its strange premise, but surprised everyone by earning over $40 million.

 A mysterious creature from another planet, resembling a giant blob of jelly, lands on earth. The people of a nearby small town refuse to listen to some teenagers (one played by Steve McQueen) who have witnessed the blob's destructive power. In the meantime, the blob just keeps on getting bigger.

 Due to the popularity of Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) we tend to think that all 50's monster movies had novelty record tie-ins, however that film fails to mention The Blob was the first to do so. Burt Bacharach and Mack David's title song.was incredibly catchy, inspriring later films like Journey to the Seventh Planet (1962), The Lost Continent (1968), and The Green Slime (1968) to try to establish their own hit pop title songs.

Most 1950's pictures tend to sway in two directions; they either depict the family unit as the ideal "leave it to beaver" household or they pick apart the family dynamic and show a household who is at odds to due generational gaps. The Blob goes in the latter direction, shaping itself to be a more horrifying version of Rebel Without A Cause. The teenagers (a term used to describe post pubescent adolescents, which was coined in the 50's) have great difficulty making their presence known among the various authority figures in their small American town. The relationships portrayed throughout the picutre are rarely cohesive, nor do they have an solid foundation. Society itself is a greater threat than the gelatinous menace. In-fact the blob is only a threat because the society is one small argument away from imploding.

More modern day pictures try to give the blob a detailed set of physical characteristics such as a mouth or internal organs, possibly in attempt to make the creature look more "scary".  The original unadorned mass of rolling goo is somehow more visually powerful and remains uniquely pleasing. The key to this character, made in a world decades away from CGI, was gravity, with the clever manipulation of models and camera placement using the laws of nature to make the blob seem to roll and ooze. It's remarkably simple, inspiring even. Nowadays so much money is put into monster movies that it seems impossible and thus intimidating for an independent filmmaker to make one, but this picture reminds the viewer that great films can be made rather cheaply. Praise it! 5/5