Classic Movie Review: Celebrate Blob-fest with 'The Blob'

It’s been more than 60 years since audiences mobbed the theaters to see The Blob starring Steve McQueen and 60 years on, The Blob remains one incredibly fun flick. This naked propaganda piece about the slow spread of the Red Menace remains a glorious piece of nostalgia and a genuinely clever piece of filmmaking that combines the best kind of camp with the best kind of star power.

The Blob stars the legendary Steve McQueen as Steve Andrews, a big man on campus who we meet while he is on a date with his girl, Jane (Aneta Corsaut). The two are at a private spot in the woods under the stars, innocently yet romantically, enjoying a night together when they see something fall from the sky. Steve immediately wants to go find it and the two drive off in search. Meanwhile, a nearby hermit named Barney (Olin Howlin) gets to the thing from the sky first.

Moments later, Steve and Jane, having failed to find the falling star, begin to drive home when they encounter the hermit in desperate pain and fear. What he found inside the meteor, because he could not resist the temptation of poking it with a stick, is a purplish-red ooze that has, when Steve and Jane find him, adhered itself to his hand. The kids rush the old man to the doctor’s office and drop him off with ol Doc Hallen (Steven Chase) where he will be cared for. Steve, meanwhile, can’t shake the idea that something more is going on with that oozing blob on the man’s arm.

Steve McQueen is incredible in The Blob. Overall, the film is silly and rather a bunch of sci-fi nonsense, but McQueen gives it gravity, if not gravitas. McQueen is so innately charismatic that you can’t help but get caught up in this story. The Blob was McQueen’s first leading man role in a feature film after breaking into television in the early 1950’s and yet you can see the movie star in him from the first frame.

McQueen commands your attention but not with the kind of macho posturing of his later career but rather through a more gentle charisma, a care and curiosity that is incredibly easy to relate to. He doesn’t stand apart from his co-stars, he’s invested in their performance as much as his own and he elevates a cast that was likely used to being outshined in B-pictures by rising stars or a good monster. His generosity as a performer here has an infectious quality.

Is The Blob cheesy and campy? Oh, absolutely it is and it’s completely charming. The low budget special effects, the obvious models covered in oozing jelly, the extras laughing and smiling as they run for their lives in the legendary theater scene, were likely seen as flaws in 1958, but today, I can’t help but see them as wonderfully campy and hilarious in the best kind of way. The sincerity of the attempt to make The Blob work lends the movie an irresistible pathos.

Then there is the extra charm of ‘The Red Scare.’ Though director Irving Yeaworth and Steve McQueen himself have never acknowledged the Cold War influences of The Blob, the metaphor is camptastically inescapable. Communism represented by an oozing red mass overtaking small town America and threatening everyone’s way of life. And how is it defeated? It’s defeated by the cold, get it, as in the Cold War. The film ends with The Blob being dropped in the arctic, because I assume dropping it in Siberia might have been a little too on the nose.

The Blob remains influential to this day though many may not recognize it. The character Blobby in the animated franchise Hotel Transylvania is based on The Blob. Yes, Blobby is green and carries some human characteristics, but the character is undeniably an offshoot of The Blob, where else could the inspiration for the character have come from? The homage is loving and the character fits well in the HT universe, about as well The Blob might have fit in the Dracula, Frankenstein, Werewolf universe, a group of equally cheesy yet serious villains in their original incarnations.

I adore the campy, goofy fun of The Blob. I enjoy it for the sincere effort to turn something so silly into something so serious and I especially enjoy Steve McQueen whose star-power is a true standout. McQueen appeared destined to be a movie star based off of this starring role, a role that many other actors might have just tossed off as just another teen movie. McQueen doesn’t exactly take the role seriously but he cares enough to make the movie matter a little and his effort is part of the charm of this incredibly charming classic.

The Blob is available as part of the Criterion Collection and the town in Pennsylvania where The Blob was shot is soon to host Blob-Fest, a tribute to the making of the movie that includes a recreation of the famous ending showing people running from a movie theater. Blob-fest takes place July 8th to the 10th in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania.