Horror Extreme Movie Catalog

Beware! The Blob (Larry Hagman, 1972)

I was jaded very, very early. I used to boast to my grade-school pals that I could eat ham sandwiches while watching The Exorcist. (Remember, kiddies, when I was in grade school, The Exorcist was still in theaters.) Movies just don't scare me. With, that is, a few notable, and mostly entirely unjustifiable, exceptions. Beware! The Blob is one of those. I didn't sleep voluntarily for months after I first saw this movie on the Friday late-night creature feature. To this day, I have no idea what it was that scared the tar out of me so badly thirty years ago. Now it's a whole other story; Dick van Patten's acting is a large part of it, to be sure.

The story: a geologist (Godfrey Cambridge, best remembered these days as Gravedigger Jones) brings back a sample from above the arctic circle (funny, I thought they took the beast the other way in the Steve McQueen movie...). Through various bits of forgetfulness, the sample is left to thaw on the counter, and the blob gets out to wreak havoc on another small town. Lisa Clark (Satan's School for Girls' Gwynne Gilford) stops in to see Chester just as the blob is devouring him, having already finished off his family, and goes screaming to her boyfriend Bobby (Easy Rider's Robert Walker) and the cops, neither of whom believe there's a big one-celled eating machine on the loose until, of course, it's entirely too late.

Now, I will start off by saying that, yes, this is an entirely awful movie. Technically, there is not a single redeeming quality about it. The acting sucks. The directing sucks. The lighting sucks. The special effects suck. The sets suck, which is pretty impressive given the number of location shots. The entire movie sucks, well and truly. But that is part of its considerable charm, for it pushes through the envelope of suck and achieves that cheesy greatness that so few films manage. Dick van Patten's obsessive Scoutmaster is pure comic gold. A couple of hobos who end up being lunchmeat for the blob are played by (director) Larry Hagman and an uncredited Burgess Meredith. Carol Lynley, Shelley Berman, Bud Cort, Byron Keith, Randy Stonehill (yes, that Randy Stonehill, playing a pot-crazed free-love-type guitarist), Gerrit Graham... it's as much fun playing spot-the-cameo as it is trying to figure out how badly the next scene is going to mangle the fifties monster-movie tropes it never even attempts to break out of.

I grant you, you have to have a certain special sense of humor to really grasp the greatness of Beware! The Blob. If, however, you recognize Night of the Lepus as the timeless piece of filmmaking it truly is, then I cannot recommend Beware! The Blob highly enough for your refined palate. An absolute keeper. **

More than satisfied with the product & the delivery time.I will continue to deal with Amazon.