The Blob

Tri-Star. Director Chuck Russell; Producer Jack H. Harris, Elliott Kastner; Screenplay Chuck Russell, Frank Darabont; Camera Mark Irwin; Editor Terry Stokes, Tod Feuerman; Music Michael Hoenig; Art Director Craig Stearns

Kevin Dillon
Shawnee Smith
Donovan Leitch
Jeffrey DeMunn
Candy Clark
Joe Seneca

A great B-movie with an A-pic budget, the Blob is back with a vengeance. Updated [from the 1958 original] with awesome, no-expense-spared special effects and a feisty female hero, horrific outing should prove thoroughly satisfying for fans of the genre.

Starting life as an aggressive glueball that creeps out of a fallen meteor and attacks a vagrant in the woods, the malevolent plasma grows to raging, ferocious proportions, gobbling unlucky locals and carrying their blood and body parts along with it. Glutinous glutton has only one weakness - ice - and that's hard to come by in this warm, weather-blighted ski town.

Director Chuck Russell (A Nightmare on Elm Street 3) builds suspense slowly and carefully, devoting 30 minutes to establishing applie-pie normalcy before the first grisly strike. Likewise, suspense in third-act crisis scenes is pumped for all it's worth. Weakest moments involve the creaky sci-fi explanation for Blob's presence, which is part of a germ warfare experiment run amok.

Perfs by Kevin Dillon as an outlaw kid who ends up battling the Blob and Shawnee Smith as a cheerleader who turns into a machinegun toting she-devil to save her town are adequate for the genre, with Dillon's the more resonant.

(Color) Available on VHS, DVD. Extract of a review from 1988. Running time: 92 MIN.

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