Movie Reviews : Beware of This Recycled, Stomach-Churning ‘Blob’

Following in the wake of “The Fly,” “The Thing” and “Invaders From Mars” the new version of “The Blob” (citywide) continues a curious craze for recycling and magnifying ‘50s horror movies. Like the others, it dresses up the lean and mean original in a gloss of stomach-churning high-tech production and splashy color. And, as before, it tries, self-consciously, to bring out political, sexual and psychological undercurrents that had been buried.

In the new “Blob” as in the old, a rampaging glob of insatiably hungry, presumably extraterrestrial goop goes on a citywide rampage--gliding, sliding, slurping and slithering its way to one horrific feast after another, while frantic teen-agers try to convince a hopelessly square police force of the dimensions of the catastrophe.

The old “Blob” has an undeserved reputation as a horror classic; it’s closer to “Plan 9 From Outer Space” than “The Thing.” But the new “Blob” runs up against an inherited problem. The idea of maniacal, crazed goop rolling around town, eating everybody in sight--however relentlessly--is more comic than horrific.

Writer-director Chuck Russell tries to have it both ways. He’s multiplied the story’s gore level, adding every conceivable manner of spectacular disemboweling and ingestion. And he’s tried to make his apparition more menacing by having it periodically bloat and roar up, red and angry, swollen with its victims.

This blob is like a disease running amok--and, in fact, a new plot twist identifies it as an experiment in germ warfare that’s backfired and is now infecting and overrunning a Middle-American ski town.

The heroes, suggestively, are an intrepid cheerleader (Shawnee Smith) and a longhaired cycle delinquent (Kevin Dillon) who’s a town outsider. Interestingly, the whole movie has a subversive tone. It’s become a fable--with AIDS connotations--about how a secretive and virulent government recklessly endangers the lives of its average citizens and then tries to cover its tracks.

The movie works best in two near-wordless sequences: the under-the-credits scene of an autumnal town emptied out for a football game, and a later, frenzied race all the way from a besieged movie house--showing a parody of “Friday the 13th”--through the alleys and into the sewers with the maddened blob in pustulant pursuit. But it never really succeeds in balancing its varying tones of humor and horror, sitcom realism and social criticism.

The humor here tends to have a callous, queasy edge. One dishwasher is pulled, screaming, down a drain. An amorous teen-ager finds his car-seat sweetheart crumpling like an apple puff and sending out blobby tentacles. This becomes sordid precisely because, though the victim’s deaths are presented humorously, the characters, mostly, aren’t--except Del Close’s fanatical minister and Donovan Leitch’s Don Juan-on-wheels. When warmblooded waitress Candy Clark and taciturn sheriff Jeffrey DeMunn are gobbled down, one almost resents it.

But more wounding than the uneven tone or thin dialogue of this “Blob” (MPAA-rated R for extreme violence) is its increased scale. The ‘50s low-budget classics were precisely that: low budget. Much of their appeal--and almost all of the original “Blob’s”--lies in their economy of means. Here, economy is the first victim chewed up by the pestilence. And by the end, the movie’s budget, like many another, seems to be its own kind of blob: swallowing everything remorselessly, famished, raging, running wild--ingesting whole audiences, whole cities, whole studios. There’s a moral in that as well: Beware of the Blob.