An attractive cast and good production values can't hide the fact that this Blob re-tread is a fast attempt to update the original film with modern special effects, and little else. After introducing 6 or 7 characters, the show soon kills off the three or four we care about the most. One in particular exits in almost a Psycho - like surprise scene, but the rest of the killings come so fast and predictably that they just don't carry any impact. Each attack is of course accompanied by in-your-face gore effects of partially dissolved and dismembered humans, that swiftly become a joke. It's almost as if the Blob weren't actually killing the humans, but instead revealing them to be made of Pla-Doh.

The earlier part of the movie is actually the best, although the very opening is so close to the Theodore Simonson original that it hardly seems to happen at all. For about ten minutes, particularly in the Hospital scenes (with a bit from David Lynch regular Jack Nance) there's an actual sense of horror. But when the loveable waitress and the reasonable sheriff are dispatched just for the sake of some quick thrills, the heart goes out of the show. The remaining characters are stock teens stretched to become action heroes. Our cheerleader heroine goes from innocent pom pom, to sewer commando, shooting machine guns, the works. The town thug, actually a pretty boy with a dark attitude, transforms into a combination Captain America and Archie Andrews. Gee, the Blob really helps people sort out their lives, doesn't it?

The commercial underpinnings of The Blob show far too clearly. The cameraman is from The Fly. The trailer apes Alien's portentious mood and taglines. The gore cheerfully outdoes the slasher subgenre, and the monster itself behaves more like the shape-shifting The Thing than Jack H. Harris' original tub of red silicone.

The plot, which drags out the overworked idea from Alien that the sinister government would purposely bring a horrible monster here for use as a biological weapon, is simply asinine, providing some really dumb guys in white suits as Blob-snacks, and as targets for the dauntless teenage heroes. The nice lawman gets killed, but he has a deputy (Paul McCrane, notable from RoboCop the year before) who starts out a jerk, just like in the first film. He transforms into a good guy by, of course, taking the side of the 'teens against the G-Men. Naturally, the filmmakers choose to waste him too. The body count here is high, and the many gruesome melted people on view seem totally gratuitous. The Blob is dispatched basically identically as in the first picture, which provides a particularly unsatisfying non-ending, complete with a coda indicating the possibility of a remake with an apocalyptic theme. Richter, Carpenter, and Cronenberg did the right thing when they re-invented their respective remakes instead of simply reiterating the originals.

Effects-wise, The Blob is an encyclopedia of what could be done in 1988, one year before The Abyss ushered in digital effects. Dream Quest Images worked on both pictures, and handles its chores here with gusto. There are mattes, matte paintings, stop motion animation and lots of shots that Savant has just no clue at all how they were done. Some effects are more successful than others but almost all of them make an impact. The scene in the phone booth, and the graphic image of the unlucky dishwasher going 'down the drain', were standouts.

Columbia TriStar's DVD of The Blob is very handsome and makes the most of the show. The sometimes hard to follow fast action is aided considerably by the widescreen picture, and only fairly narrow pan'n scans were available before. There's the trailer mentioned above, and that's it for extras.

On a scale of Excellent, Good, Fair, and Poor,
The Blob rates:
Movie: Fair+
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent
Supplements: trailer
Packaging: Keep case
Reviewed: September 8, 2001