1958/1988: A TALE OF TWO BLOBS

1958. Two teenagers, Steve and Jane, are negotiating their way around mutual attraction and the horror constraints on sex in the early cold war when they see a massive red meteor crash in the distance. An old timer has also seen it and finds the landing site. He pokes at a small cratered ball which splits open. A red gelantinous mass emerges which climbs up his stick and takes possession of his hand. Steve and Jane have given up their search for the meteor and drive off for a sandwich at the local diner when they come across the old timer who is still alive but in agony from the alien splodge colonising his arm. They zoom him to the local doctor who has never seen anything like it. Steve leaves the patient with the doctor but is hounded by the local teen gang who can't quite work out if they're rock and rollers or beatniks but can settle on their place in car culture. After a tricky solution to get rid of them, Steve is stopped and lectured by the local good cop and let go. Steve was on a mission to check the area where the old guy lived to see if anyone else was affected. At his cabin they find his dog which they take with them while the beatrocker gang catch up and make nice and try to get everyone along to the local allnight sci-horror marathon at the local cinema. But the offworld jelly shot has its own agenda and, after absorbing more and more of the tasty humans around it, it heads into town for more.

1988. While the big highschool football game is on, young tearwaway Brian tries to jump the gap in an old bridge with his motorbike. He crashes and falls but picks himself up and says hi to an old timer who's collecting cans. That's the one who finds the meteor that crashes to earth and is himself found by two teenagers negotiating their way around etc etc. This time they take the afflicted man to the local hospital. Meanwhile, lots of other things until the big government saviour team arrives but reveals itself to have its own agenda. 

There is a commonly accepted wisdom that cinephiles seem to have agreed upon telepathically in the '90s that proposes the rule-proving exception that the only good remakes are The Thing, The Fly and Invasion of the Bodysnatchers. All else travels back in the spectrum from good cover band versions to the great mass of half baked attempts at cashing in on old classics. The '80s Blob, after a second viewing, is its own case.

The original has plenty of appeal. Whether it's the apparition of a young Steve McQueen playing lead teen or the still impressive effects work that brings the titular jelly mold to life, The 1958 Blob deserves its classic status. I missed this on tv in the mid-'70s and my Nanna recounted it for me in her stern Russian accent. She imagined it (on her black and white tv set) as a kind of sick jade green which made every moment that it used to "consoomp" a human that much more vile. She was delighted to infect me with it but it wasn't for many years that I saw it first and in colour and saw that the blob was a thick Cold War red. Actually, at first it's clear but with every bloodfilled human it meets and greets it just gets bigger and redder. But really, that's just a fallback, the blob is pretty obviously a red menace. Its attack on the cinema is a master stroke. Not only is it done with the gleeful irony of doing for real what the things in the horror movies are only playing at, but the chance taken to suggest the insidiousness of the red monster invading minds through culture and it is of course the way anybody saw it on release. And then there is the solution which proves ingenious and carries the sense that the blob, like any idea, can't be killed but might be contained. The question mark that appears as the final shot fades was meant to carry a lot of weight. As I'll suggest in the soiler section ahead, this weight has changed in a way that the original film makers would never had suspected.

The problems with the film are largely those of pacing. It can take a lot of screen time to get something established by which time our anticipation for the next plot point is fuelled with impatience. There is one positive feature to this, however. As the sets give very little indication of the town surrounding them, the world building is down to the various relations between authority and trouble, youth and maturity are given more breathing space than a schlockier outing would afford. This adds a veneer of naturalism to the fantastic elements. Is the casting of Steve McQueen a problem? For some it will be, especially if they are better familiar with the roles of his heavily successful 1960s and '70s. He does seem like a forty year old with amnesia who has been coached in teenage mannerisms but his roundness, just enough vulnerability and screen magnetism break him out of the obvious age mismatch. This was nowhere near his first gig but it was his first movie lead and his restrained youthful aggression could easily trump the more histrionic outbursting bonanzas of his then more famous contemporaries. I wonder if his counterpart, Aneta Corsaut's Jane, was cast to alleviate the shock of the older McQueen pretending to be seventeen. While she is clearly younger than McQueen she also does look older than her supposed seventeen. 

I love the title sequence in this movie. A kind of hand drawn red spiral turns as the title appears in ominous red. While that happens we get one of the strangest pairings of music to movie in cinema history. No screaming Black Lagoon trumpets or storming orchestral chords for this bub. Nope, we get a kind of Latin cocktail hour spritz of one-two cha-cha-cha that is almost made from modernist  geometric wallpaper and little swords to use as olive picks. Then the goofiest stacked male vocal booms in with a goofier lyric warning us of the blob which "creeps and leaps and slides across the floor". Music by Burt Bacharach and lyric by his usual collaborator ..'s brother. At first experience it seems to drag the whole movie into Rocky and Bullwinkle territory but subsequent viewings give it more heft for its period perfection. It really doesn't need to announce itself as a moment of terror as the movie itself does a lot of that work. Strangely, it feels retro, a mix of carefully reconstructed oldie and a fab op-shop find.

The remake starts in with a montage that builds the town from the word go. Small place but grows with the snow season which is imminent. The metal font of the credits with the cyberpunk glow behind it yells '80s like nothing else can. The teens at the game actually look like teens (in the teen cinema decade that Spielberg built) and no one more than the Steve substitute Brian who is played by a Kevin Dillon who really does look about seventeen. 

The plot follows the original at least initially but veers off  with a decidedly different take on the day-saving government forces. In the '50s these sealed the deal and physically removed the threat. In the '80s of Reagan and the more terrifying thing that the Cold War had become, they are the stuff of nightmares. In scenes that might well have inspired the following decade's X-Files, the contamination-suited military personnel only look like they're there to help but the closure of the town is not for the town's protection. After a big climax we get another proto X-Files moment where a particular character who has gone from comic relief to a sleazy worry has a potentially apocalyptic last word.

The '80s remake undercuts the sense of order that the original must serve for tis resolution. The era of Glasnost had already dismantled the reds under the bed paranoia that older sci-fi could exploit (The Blob '58 was paired with the infiltration horror I Married a Monster from Outer Space). The Reagan years government various diced with scandals like Iran Contra, invasions of Grenada and Panama, and a palpably popular view of a government running away from control by congress. The teens aren't only bored and horny in this one, they're alert to the forces of control and how that can stamp on concepts like patriotism or humanism when the possibilities of weapons development are in the offing. The 1988 Blob is a fine remake. No, not a Fly or Body Snatchers, but a strong response to its own time through a revisit to a concept of an all consuming force. If you come across it (especially, if you are familiar with the original) give it a burl.

SPOILER SECTION

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The original movie ended with the discovery that the blob could be immobilised with cold and was subdued with CO2 fire extinguishers. This involved a local school teacher bursting out of his anti-youth fuddiness as he broke into his own school building to get at more extinguishers which drew a massive cheer from all the teens around him.

The military airlift the frozen blob to the Arctic where it will stay neutralised. One character comments: "as long as the Arctic stays cold." As we see the blob lowered to the icy wasteland we are confronted with a screen filling question mark. Did that refer to nuclear weapons at the time? These days it might only refer to the daily news.

The 1988 remake reveals that the blob emerged from a U.S. military satellite and is being investigated by the military as a possible mass weapon. The town is cordoned off as an experiment, not just for quarrantine. The avuncular Dr. Meddows is prepared to be a mass murderer.

The final image in the 1998 version is of the priest preparing for the Apocaylpse as he holds a jar with a piece of the blob writhing inside. It's not just the soldiers that this film wants to warn you about.