To THE BLOB You Are Lunch

Go back a couple of posts and check out the three movies I originally planned to review for today. See how all of them were foreign, exotic, and critically acclaimed? Well Blockbuster didn’t have any of them, and you didn’t have to get your Master’s degree from the University of the fucking obvious to see that The Blob was the evident fourth choice.

In the last year I’ve seen Freddy Vs. Jason, Alien Vs. Predator…I’ve even heard rumors of a Freddy Vs. Jason Vs. Ash movie. Yeah, it seems like everyone wants a piece of everyone in this free-for-all era of dead ‘80s movie monsters challenging other dead ‘80s movie monsters to the death, but I’ve noticed that no one’s knocking down the Blob’s door looking for a fight. If you were to view video footage of Steven Segal’s home, you’d also notice that no one seems to be bursting in on him while he’s on the toilet, handing him a samurai sword, putting him in a wrist lock, and daring him to try to get out of it, pussy, either. That’s because these are the first- and second-worst ideas in the world, respectively.

I had no idea how omnipotent the Blob was until last night, when I saw it kill people in ways that defy the very laws of a) Hollywood and b) the cosmos. Not to mention, the fact that you were just eaten by something that looks like Pop-Tart filling adds insult to injury and is even somewhat ironic. The Blob is the new king of horror because:

1) The Blob will break the laws of physics…while he breaks your ass!
Freddy Kruger controls your dreams, which means that if he wants to kill you in your sleep by cutting out your veins and turning you into a human marionette, he can and will. I’ve seen him do it. With that said, I’ve never once seen him grab a grown man by the face and pull him down a two-inch sink drain. The Blob's done it, and he was even polite enough not to point out to Freddy that he wasn’t in no damn dream world while he was doing it. But you could tell he was thinking it. Later in the movie, the Blob bent a man in half, backwards, and yanked him through a door window no more than a foot in diameter.*

2) The Blob fucking hates kids
Have you ever seen a kid under the age of 12 killed onscreen in a movie, ever? No, you haven’t. Unless you’ve seen The Blob. While chasing a pair of kids though a sewer, the Blob extends it’s middle finger towards Hollywood and their unwritten but firmly established horror movie rules by finally catching and killing one of them. On screen. Of course, this is the Blob, so he couldn’t just eat the screaming kid without slowly dissolving off all of his skin first. On screen. Man. If I ever find myself sitting next to the Blob on a subway, I’m just going to avoid eye contact, pretend like I’m reading my paper, and wait for my stop.


3) The Blob was made in the U.S.A
I know it sounds like I am, but I’m totally not ruining the movie by telling you that the Blob turns out to be a chemical weapon engineered by the U.S. government to fight—you guessed it—the Soviets. Yeah, if the Blob would’ve been released under the unsuspecting Iron Curtain as planned we may have been able to save Apollo Creed’s life, but don’t hate the Blob for escaping. Hate the system that failed to contain it. So if you ever find yourself being digested by the Blob, it may make you feel better know that when he’s eating you, he’s doing it with a dose of the good old American spirit.


According to John Travolta, this is what the Blob is called in France.

The Blob is so badass that his movie is the only movie to ever give me nightmares without me even seeing it. Remember Fangoria magazine? True story: I saw a few pictures of the Blob’s aftermath in it one day as a kid and I literally couldn’t eat for two days after because they were so disgusting. I figured there was no better time to fight my fears than now. After finally watching the movie that caused me to prejudicially judge amorphous government-designed chemical weapons as a kid, I must say that the blob oozed his way right out of the screen and right into my heart. Yeah, I still fear the Blob, but now I don’t fear him out of fright. I fear him out of respect. R-E-S-P-E-C-T.

The Blob is what the Shocktober Spectacular is all about. It’s the most fun movie I’ve seen yet. Three and a half Jason heads.

* the guy who got yanked out the door was Paul McCrane, who was notorious in the ‘80s for his gruesome movie deaths. He was guy in Robocop who fell in the toxic waste vat and then got hit by a car so hard it made his already-melting head explode against the windshield. He finally achieved mainstream success in 2000 as a regular on E.R., where it probably wasn’t long before his character was stabbed in the eye with an AIDS-infected scalpel and then thrown out of a window just before his corpse was anally violated by an elephant.