Beware the Blob (1972) brings up a question: have you ever wanted to punch a movie?
Wait, let me rephrase that. Have you ever wanted to punch a movie that isn’t a modern Disney offering?
I wanted to punch Beware the Blob. I wanted to punch it like Bruce Willis punched Kim Coates in The Last Boy Scout. It’s a kindness really.
This is not to advocate bullying, at least on a large scale. Yet, bullying may have a use when implemented in a surgical fashion, like punching Beware the Blob.
Beware the Blob
The Blobiverse started in 1958. The Blob starred Steve McQueen and is an effective example of a B movie.
You got a monster, albeit a shapeless digestive mass rather than a Martian or a radioactive beastie, you got victims and you got authorities trying to stop it.
It’s the perfect way to light up a drive-in screen while kids eat popcorn and drink Cokes laced with whiskey from their father’s liquor cabinet.
The Blob was remade in 1988 and ended up much better than expected. It leaned into grotesque special effects and joined The Thing and The Fly as worthy updates of the originals.
And then there is Beware the Blob. I once accidentally ate a slice of an orange and a dill pickle one after the other. It was a terrible combination. Beware the Blob is the cinematic equivalent of that experience.
It tries to be a spoof and serious simultaneously. As a result, it is neither.
In an interview with screenwriter Anthony Harris (son of Jack H. Harris, producer of the original), he stated that a good portion of the film was improvised rather than following the script.
One has the same thought while watching. It seemed like the director pointed the camera at the actors and said, “Be funny.”
But they aren’t funny. And the situations aren’t funny. It all ends up as awkward as my first dance where I ended up thrown down on the floor with a wallet stuffed between my teeth because people thought I was having a seizure.
I still can’t hear Stages by ZZ Top without wetting my pants.
The Movie J.R. Shot
Weirdly enough Beware the Blob is directed by Larry Hagman, who played J.R. on Dallas. This happened because Hagman lived in the beach house next to Harris.
Harris showed Hagman his personal 16mm print of The Blob. Hagman liked it and believed he could assemble a group of friends for a sequel but only on the condition that he could direct.
Does that mean Hagman was friends with the likes of Gerrit Graham, Dick Van Patten, Cindy Williams and Burgess Meredith. Maybe, because they all appear in the film briefly.
Interestingly enough, Del Close, who plays the apocalyptic preacher in the 1988 remake appears in a blink-and-you-miss it role.
Beware the Blob is also one of the first films of the great cinematographer Dean Cundey. He worked as a camera operator for the opening sequence, which inexplicably features a kitten playing in the grass.
Nice Blobs
Beware the Blob stars the great man-boy himself, Robert Walker. (You can check out another role of his on The Last Movie Outpost Trek On Series.) Walker is the son of the other Robert Walker, who played the memorable psycho Bruno in Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train.
Walker does not break any acting boundaries in Beware the Blob. He mostly drives around in a truck and expresses an affinity for avocados.
His denim wardrobe accessorized with a plate-metal belt and bracelet is particularly fetching. He climbs around on ropes at one point, perhaps because he is trying to escape the movie…or maybe he was trying to hang himself. We may never know.
Gwynne Gilford plays Walker’s girlfriend. Her role in the movie is to scream about the Blob. Gilford did go on to appear in a couple of other movies, plus the 1987 Masters of the Universe, but she quit acting and became a psychotherapist. No doubt she was good at that, as she learned a lot about dealing with trauma from starring in Beware the Blob.
Gilford is also noteworthy for giving birth to Chris Pine, who is noteworthy for motivating Olivia Munn to send him annotated nudes. Once again, we are reminded just how normal all of the people gracing our silver screens are at the end of the day.
We All Blob On
The story for Beware the Blob is similar to the first film. The Blob comes to town, starts absorbing the residents and finally gets frozen, this time at an ice-skating rink. All that is fine, but every step through the process is a misstep.
Beware the Blob is an ugly film. It looks like it was lit with fluorescent lights. Combine that with hideous 1970s outfits, and you have a movie that is the filmic equivalent of leprosy.
The Blob is unleashed because a man (a black man, I should add to show Beware the Blob was DEI compliant) returns from a mission to the Arctic. He brings back a piece of the original Blob that thaws out…even as the original The Blob is playing on his TV.
What is Return of the Blob trying to say with this meta insertion? That we are victims in reality to our obsession with victims in fantasy? I doubt it. I’m not even sure Return of the Blob has the intelligence to speak through a bell mounted on the arm of its wheelchair.
It’s Blobbing Time
Meanwhile, almost all of the characters behave like buffoons. Gerrit Graham jumps around like an idiot in a gorilla suit. Dick Van Patten leads a boy scout troop obsessed with clackers. Why? Who knows? The movie simply cuts to the boy scout troop randomly.
All of the police are idiots. At one point, Hagman seemingly asks a deputy, played by Rockne Tarkington (who was originally slated to play the Jim Kelly role in Enter the Dragon), to “be funny” as he wanders around a diner. The scene ends with Tarkington breaking the fourth wall by goofily smiling at the camera with a “did I do good?” expression on his face.
Mort Garson does the music. It is a synth score that skews too far into kooky and makes everything onscreen feel even more off kilter. The movie offers the composer a chance to create a “Blob Theme,” but he doesn’t take it. Instead, the creature is represented by a high-pitched whistle that makes a person feel like they will turn into an ax murder if they have to listen to it for three more seconds.
The Blob effects are not much of an improvement on the original. A red-dyed powder was blended with water to form goop. Sometimes a balloon is used or red sheeting. The most effective effect is when blob material is placed on a roller mounted in front of the camera. The camera then advances on victims, and it looks like the Blob is genuinely oozing forward to encompass them.
At one point, I’m pretty sure red-dyed apple sauce is poured through the windows of a miniature bowling alley.
Yes, definitely Beware the Blob
Never in my wildest dreams did I expect Beware the Blob to be this bad. The first film is fun. The remake is borderline great. That means this one should have landed somewhere in the middle. Instead, it is pure 1970s wood-paneled, Formica trash. It needs the Rocky treatment. It’s not bullying.
It’s a kindness, really…
