Streaming Availability: Who the fuck cares?
This is the first movie I Dream of Jeannie and Dallas star, Larry Hagman ever directed. It is also the last theatrical film he ever made. Hagman would have a long career in television, mostly as an actor, occasionally directing. One thing Hagman was not was a horror guy, or a special effects guy. I did as much research as I could trying to find any explanation as to why this happened at all.
What compelled Hagman to do this? And at what point did he realize this was a bad idea? I don't know. Beware! The Blob feels like a movie that was given up on. This feels like a production wherein everybody stopped caring at some point. Maybe they never cared. I can at least say they got all the scenes in focus on camera, so at least Hagman completed the assignment.
Beware! The Blob (also known as "Son of Blob" for some reason) is a sequel to the original 1958 film, at least in theory. This gets confusing very quickly. Fifteen years after parts of Pennsylvania were eaten by a slime monster from space, an oil pipeline worker, Chester (stand-up comedian Godfrey Cambridge doing nothing funny) returns from the Arctic with a canister of pink ooze. Keeping it in his freezer, the ooze accidentally gets left out on the counter for too long, meaning the Blob is loose again. First a fly, then the kitty, then Chester's wife, then Chester himself, all eaten and absorbed into the mass. Chester notably dies while sitting around in his dirty living room watching TV. And what's on TV? Shots of Steve McQueen and the cops all from The Blob.
Why is that? What does that mean? Are we going meta here? No, it is just a joke that does not really make sense. Maybe they had an idea here at some point, but they gave up halfway through.
That describes a lot of what happens here. Beware! The Blob is a bizarre movie but in uninteresting ways. Most of the dialog feels like it was ad-libbed. They cast a lot of comedy people to do shtick, but the jokes are so strange it's hard to tell what the gag even was. Like, in the twenty minutes we keep cutting back to Dick Van Patten as a shrill scoutmaster leading some boys on a hike. There is no set up here, no punchline, the boy scouts disappear from the movie entirely after this. (Possibly they're eaten by the Blob off-camera? But one kid shows up in the ending, who knows?). The whole joke is "look, here's Dick Van Patten with toilet paper". "Hey, here's Burgess Meredith as a hobo in a poncho." "Here's a hippie getting his first haircut and a very pretentious hair stylist." "Here's a naked Yugoslavian man." It is like the filmmakers assembled all the pieces of a comedy, like they were aware of what a joke was, they had done scientific studies on the concepts, but had no idea how to actually be funny.
You know what this reminds me of? The 2016 Ghostbusters remake. These movies are a lot of comedy people without structure, everybody hoping that by random chance they can make something funny happen.
Gerrit Graham in an ape suit is a highlight of Beware! The Blob because at least he is Gerrit Graham. Of all the guys to point out at the camera, I'll take this one. Oh, you don't know Gerrit Graham? He was Bud the C.H.U.D.! He was Beef in Phantom of the Paradise! He was the bad guy in The Philadelphia Experiment II! Part of watching all these B-movie is collecting Guys whose appearance gives you joy. "Hey, Gerrit Graham, that's one of my Guys!"
There really is not much of a plot to speak of with Beware! The Bob. Much like the original movie it is about some young adults seeing the monster attacking and the police not believing them. Our stars are Bobby (Robert Walker) and Lisa (Gwynne Gilford). In terms of "structure", as much as I can even use such a term, Beware! The Blob is mostly a slasher movie. 70% of the run time is random Blob attacks on random victims. Some attacks are okay, most are not. We're missing all the fun of a slasher movie because there's no gore, no nudity, and yeah, nothing funny. If I wanted to see a miserable slog of a slasher, I would just rewatch In a Violent Nature.
Even the soundtrack is bad. The opening titles is not Burt Bacharach surf rock jazz, instead it is this awful clown music.
Effect-wise, Beware! The Blob is at least not less competent than the 1958 B-movie it was inspired by. But not any better, really. Most shots of the Blob are clearly some kind of jello. The creature is a lot more fluid than it was in the Fifties. They get a few decent shots of the monster pouring out into a miniature of a bowling alley. The best filmmaking idea is to use red gels on the lights, giving a nice lurid red effect on a lot of the Blob attacks. Most Blob attacks are shot with some goo close to the camera and the actor in the distance, so you get an obvious perspective gag that a big monster is attacking them. At least the Blob interacts with actors more often on camera this time, even if it is just some sticky snot shit stuck to their pants.
The one actually good joke is seen in one of the many posters for Beware! The Blob. That's where the Blob is about to devour a guy and the victim throws up a cardboard cross as if what works on Dracula will work on The Bob.
Luckily the Blob wanders onto an ice rink and that sorta solves itself right there. The movie somehow drags on for another twenty minutes before they finally turn on the freezer. There's another "THE END?" credits stinger. But you can tell Beware! The Bob's heart is not in it. The kids in the theater from the original movie would not even bother laughing at this one, they would walk out and go home early.
Beware! The Blob has this nasty vibe of the grossest parts of the Seventies. The aesthetics are not retro, just ugly, with tobacco stains you'll never wash out and a reefer smell that will never dissipate. The cast feels hung over and burnt out. There are hippies but their revolution has already failed, all that's left are smelly dudes out for ass and grass. Even the Squares feel sticky and in need of a shower by this point. We made the wrong choices at the end of the Sixties and everybody knows it, Nixon is in power, and there's nothing left to do but drown our sorrows in stacks and stacks of aluminum Miller Lite cans. Beware! The Blob is supposed to be a silly comedy and instead feels depressing. I want to turn a hose on this movie and watch it wash away down a storm drain with all the other filth left on the sidewalk.
When do the Eighties start again?
Well, thankfully this was not the final Blob movie. We do have a remake, and Larry Hagman had nothing to do with that production.
Next time! Fuck this, we're going back to black and white. Village of the Damned.
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