A homeless man, investigating a meteorite, is attacked by a small, amoeba-like blob that begins to dissolve his hand. High school football star Paul Taylor (Donovan Leitch) and cheerleader Meg Penny (Shawnee Smith), along with teen bad-boy Brian Flagg (Kevin Dillon) take him to the hospital. When he dies, along with others, Flagg is blamed, and no one believes the story of an ever-growing, carnivorous blob.
Following the remakes of 1950’s sci-fi flicks Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Fly, Invaders from Mars, and The Thing, comes this 1988 updating of the drive-in film, The Blob. But this time, they made a horror film.
The original had no frights, being a mix of camp and the over-forty set’s vision of teenage angst. The rebel-without-a-cause teen was the twenty-eight-year-old Steve McQueen, who fought alongside his best girl, who was twenty-five.
The newer version tosses the gee-wiz, gosh and golly, teenage alienation, though there’s still a tough-kid (played by Dillon who only looks a few years too old). He’s a rebel all right, and he has the leather jacket to prove it. Shawnee Smith, who is almost the right age, is the best of the human leads and gives a bit of credibility to her cheerleader-with-a-machinegun.
But none of the humans are all that interesting and clichés are everywhere. The characters are drawn with just enough complexity to make them distinct when they are liquified. It is in the monster that The Blob excels. No slow moving Jell-O here, this blob darts out tentacles and zips across ceilings. It looks good, and so do the many deaths it causes. I was surprised at how visceral the film is. With everything from full body dissolves to limbs being pulled out, this is top notch gore, but somehow done as good clean fun.
The coincidences run too high (our hero is saved from being shot by an opportune blob attack) and the teen angle offers nothing new, but it’s easy to forget about that when a telephone booth and its unhappy occupant are being engulfed.
With a more engaging group of characters (perhaps not standard teens we’ve seen over and over), this could have been an excellent horror picture. Oh well. Invite over a few friends, dim the lights, and toss this on as the second part of a double feature with John Carpenter’s The Thing, and you have a twisted, gory, pop-corn eating Friday night.