Yesterday's Movies

Before watching the movie:

This is one of the most iconic 50s sci-fi monster movies, from what I understand. Alien jelly from space lands on a meteorite and threatens to eat a small town. It’s both a very typical 50s b-movie plot and also has the unique element of the monster being completely unlike any animal entity we’re familiar with, more of a force of nature than anything we usually have to reckon with in this genre.

After watching the movie:

While parked at a makeout point, Steve and Jane see a meteorite crash and go to see if they can find what landed, but an old man who lives in a cabin nearby gets there first. He breaks open the rock with a stick and finds a blob of goop, which after some further poking lands on his hand and sticks so firmly and painfully he can’t get it off, and while running for help Steve and Jane nearly run him over. They take him to Dr. Hallen and then go back to the place of the impact to try to find clues as to what happened. Meanwhile, the blob consumes all of the old man, and then the nurse, and just when Steve and Jane return to the doctor, Steve sees the doctor consumed by the Blob. They run to get the police, but when the police officers see the doctor’s office locked from the inside and stuff scattered everywhere, but no sign of any people or an attack, and assume these kids are just making up stories to mess with them late at night and bring arrest them to be picked up by their parents. Steve, certain that they saw something dangerous that the people need to be warned of, refuses to leave it alone, and the young couple recruit their classmates to warn people and try to find proof the police will believe. All the while the Blob moves from victim to victim, getting bigger and redder.

This is much more talking and less monster than I expected, even by the standard of a B movie. There’s a lengthy sequence where the other teens badger Steve into racing their car that serves no purpose but introducing the other car full of teens and their relationship with the local police officers, but goes on much longer than necessary to do either. It feels like the movie forgot there’s a hungry alien threat for ten minutes of a very short runtime. Even when the plot does get going again, there’s a long, blobless stretch of teens trying to get around adult skepticism and the movie only really gets back on track when Steve and Jane find Steve’s father’s store unlocked and empty.

Despite how simple they are, I do find the blob effects pretty well done. It looks like the main technique used might be a balloon covered in jelly, but they do get some effective use out of just putting a dab of jelly in front of the camera, filming it settling, and then running that back and forth to make it look like it’s breathing. The theater attack scene is justifiably the main visual that seems to be remembered from this movie, and the way it oozes inside is probably the easiest effect in the movie.

It’s pretty irritating how long the movie runs on “police think the kids are just pulling pranks”. Of course it’s more likely at first than the story they’re telling, but when the teens persist in insisting that they’re trying to save the town from an unknown threat in the face of that skepticism and threats of punitive action, it goes on to the point where the police come off as willfully obstructive and thankfully the one officer who’s friends with Steve turns up on the scene about ten seconds before it becomes impossible to deny that they’re telling the truth.

The solution ends up being kind of simple, but I appreciated that it let teenagers’ basic knowledge of science guide them to the answer. I miss that raw optimism in the power of high quality education. Ultimately, they can only stop the Blob, not destroy it, but they get the military to airlift it to where they expect to be harmless “as long as the arctic stays cold”, which sounds much more menacing now than it was meant to back in the day, and even so they used the final disposition for a “The End…?” cliche anyway.

This movie is much smaller than its memory and legacy. I know there was a big budget remake in the 80s, but I checked out the trailer for it and it looks like they went too far in fleshing out the bones presented here. This movie isn’t horrifying, it’s not campy, it’s just a lot of talking and denial until it’s time for a finale, but in the end, it’s a small town menaced by an alien monster that can’t be reasoned with, and and that it does deliver.