A meteorite hits in a wooded area near a “typical” 1950s town. It carried a small amorphous blob that attacks an old man’s hand and begins to dissolve it. Teenagers Steve Andrews (Steve McQueen) and Jane Martin (Aneta Corsaut) find the man and take him to the local doctor. The blob grows, devouring the old man, the doctor, and his nurse, but local police and parents refuse to believe.
As a film, there’s not much to like about The Blob, but as piece of history, it’s fascinating. The cinematic mistakes start with casting. The ’28 year old McQueen, in his first lead role, is ten years too old to play a high school student, particularly a “gee-shucks” high school student. At 25, Corsaut (best known as Helen Crump on The Andy Griffith Show) isn’t much better.
Characterizations are as bad as the casting. Steve Andrews, and the “kids” he meets drag racing around town, are the local bad boys, and you’ve never seen such a group of pure, angelic teens. These rebellious teens would fit in your average episode of Father Knows Best. Jane, is “the girl.” That’s it. She screams, she faints (yes, she faints), and she coos over a cute dog.
The plot is slow, forgetting about the monster for extended sections, and the dialog is ludicrous, with such statements as, “This little pebble’s been out there hot-roddin’ around the universe?” Everyone’s actions are ridiculous (the teens go door to door telling people to beware of the monster, and police think it’s odd that a bar is abandoned with an open cash register, but not important enough to do anything about).
The Blob is a combination of two films, a simplistic, empty, but fun, horror film, and a socially ignorant, teenage angst movie. While it is the first which makes it watchable, I doubt if anyone would remember it if not for the second. Hollywood had only recently discovered that teens buy movie tickets. After the success of several mainstream teen rebel pictures, I was a Teenage Werewolf (1957) took teen alienation into genre film. The Blob used the trappings (teen slang, fast cars), but its only insight into the teenage mind is that teens feel that no one listens to them. However, for a generation that hadn’t seen themselves represented on film, that was enough.
It also has a strange, boppy theme song: “Beware of The Blob, it creeps and leaps and glides and slides, across the floor.” Oh yeah.
Followed by Beware! The Blob (1957) and remade as The Blob (1988).