BEWARE ! THE BLOB (1972)

DIRECTED by Larry "J.R. Ewing" Hagman.

SCREENPLAY by Anthony Harris & Jack Woods from a story by Richard Clair & Jack H. Harris.

STARRING  - Robert Walker as Bobby Hartford,  Gwynne Clifford as Lisa Clarke,  Richard Stahl as Edward Fazio,  Richard Webb as Sheriff Jones plus a cast of thousands(ish).

PLOT - An oil pipeline engineer called Chester returns to his small town home after months working offshore near the North Pole. He brings with him a frozen sample of a jelly like substance that he found frozen whilst working. His wife accidentally thaws it and the "blob" of substance comes to life, killing and eating first Chester's pet kitten, then his wife, then Chester himself. 

Lisa, a friend of Chester, calls round to visit him only to see him in the final stages of being consumed by the voracious alien Blob, she escapes and tells her boyfriend, Bobby. 

Very soon, the two teens are trying to alert the authorities about the deadly alien menace in thier midst, however nobody will believe them.

The Blob goes on a rampage, killing and eating everybody it comes across. Can the deadly alien threat be contained before it consumes not just the small town but the entire surface of Planet Earth ?

TAGLINE - "THE FILM THAT J.R SHOT !"

PERFORMANCES  - Beware! The Blob is a strange film, in that its most memorable performances come from its large and varied supporting cast who make cameo appearances rather than its two main characters. Robert Walker and Gwynne Clifford play Bobby and Lisa, the two "teenagers" who discover the Blob and try to warn the town about the alien menace. They basically fill the same plot requirements and roles as Steve McQueen and Aneta Corseaut in the 1958 original although Walker doesn't have the screen presence or charisma that McQueen did. They're both OK, they do what's required of them well enough, which is mainly to look scared and frustrated most of the time.

As I said, where this film really shines is in its sheer volume of supporting cast cameos and the assorted bunch of weirdo townsfolk that they portray. That's right...weirdos, the lot of them. The small, unnamed Los Angeles town in which this movie takes place is home to one of the strangest, most bizzare cast of characters I think I've ever seen in a film. This place is so off kilter that it makes Twin Peaks look like Milton Keynes on a boring Sunday afternoon.

For starters you get director Larry Hagman and Burgess Meredith making cameos as a pair of hippy hating hobos. You get Tiger Joe Marsh as an overweight Turk, naked except for a Fez hat, running down the street (to be fair he does get attacked by the Blob whilst taking a bath). Then there's future Captain Spaulding Sid Haig as a redneck street cop. If thats not bizzare enough for you, how about the drunken student (Gerritt Graham) who spends the entire movie running around in a gorilla outfit pretending to be a monkey ? Or Shelly Berman as the world's most pretentious back street barber - "I don't CUT hair, I SCULPT hair".

We also get Randy Stonehill playing an irritating hippy, stoned out of his mind whilst singing terrible songs, Dick Van Patten playing a camp and ineffectual scoutmaster who's troop of young boyscouts run absolute rings around him. Then there are the uncredited performers, the priest who tries to stop the Blob by warding it off with a crucifix, the man in the wheelchair in the bowling alley and many, many more. All these weird cameos and background characters are incredibly memorable just for thier sheer oddness, even though most of them are only onscreen for scant minutes. It is these little slices of small town weirdness which really make this film enjoyable.

SFX - Pretty much the same type of practical slime effect is used to achieve the Blob as was used in the 1958 original. It works just as well here as it did there. The best scene is probably when the Blob attacks a bowling alley at the film's climax (an obvious homage to the cinema attack in the first movie).

SEX & VIOLENCE  - Lots of scenes of the Blob rolling over people and consuming them. Theres no gore as such, although the very nature of the Blob makes it look messy. Perhaps the most horrific death is when Chester (Godfrey Cambridge) gets eaten, its his agonised screaming that really sells it...

My favourite kill has to be the Preist. It's just the way he vainly holds up his cross (like thats going to stop it) as he's being eaten. A man of faith to the bitter end...

Of course, on a personal level with me being the massive cat lover that I am, the most upsetting death in the film is when the little kitten gets eaten. You just CAN'T GO THERE and yet this film does...

RATING - Beware! The Blob is an odd, odd film indeed. It's partially a remake of the original, having pretty much the same story and yet clearly a sequal at the same time. Strangely enough, the events of the original film seem to have both taken place in this world (the revived Blob is taken from the North Pole where it's frozen remains where airlifted to at the end of the original movie) and also NOT to have taken place either (Chester watches the original 1958 movie on TV at one point, maybe in this universe somebody heard of the original Blob attack and it got made into a film...starring Steve McQueen naturally...). Of course, all this serves to do is add to the film's heightened sense of oddness.

It also has a slightly sleazy look and feel to it, that 70's grittiness is definitely to the fore here. If the 1958 movie was a drive-in classic,  it's 1972 sequal is predominantly a grindhouse flick.

With it's strange cast of characters, dodgy continuity and 70's trash sensibilities this film is a true treat for lovers of weird and bizzare cinema. I'm going to give it 4 and a half weird small town hicks out of 5. Watch it late at night on a Saturday with the beer of your choice and let its oddball qualities overwhelm you.