Beware! The Blob (1972)
"It's loose again eating everyone!"
Plot
A technician brings back a frozen specimen back from the North Pole after a drilling expedition. What he doesn't realise is that it is a frozen piece of the Blob. His wife accidentally defrosts it, letting it loose once again on a small unwitting town.
The Blob is considered one of the finest cult films of all time. It's so bad that it's actually fantastic in places and really captured the essence of 50s sci-fi flicks down to a tee. Despite the numerously cheesy moments, it was shot as a serious sci-fi film and just became a camp classic thanks to the deadpan nature of the characters in the face of what they were up against. It's a wonder it took someone fourteen years to make a sequel but here we are with Beware! The Blob. It's evident from the start that the tone is jokey and this is not to be taken seriously but this is where the problems begin. Trying to be a comedy and a horror at the same time, Beware! The Blob fails miserably at both.
Whereas the original was so bad, it was good, this is just downright awful. The decision to go for laughs is bizarre, as the actors goof and ham it up for the camera, delivering painfully unfunny lines one after another in a series of seemingly never ending improvised vignettes. Directed by Larry Hagman, of Dallas fame, it's clear why he never directed another motion picture with this wholly incompetent affair. He's pretty clueless in the hot seat and the confusing opening couple of scenes tell you everything you need to know about the next ninety minutes. There's no explanations, no story, just people talking to each other. There's no explanation of how this technician actually managed to get a frozen canister back to his house or what the blob was doing there in the first place. There's no overall story arc linking everything and no structure, just a random number of scenes tacked together.
This is because Beware! The Blob seems to be focused around the blob as its main character and that's it. Although the blob isn't confined to the canister for long, it's soon sucking up everything in sight, including a really cute kitten and the two people living in the house. From here onwards, the the narrative quickly falls into a repetitive cycle of stand-alone set pieces which follows a formula of 'introduce character, have blob kill character, have blob move on' comes into effect. The situations seem improvised as if they were making it up as they went along. The hobos in the street, the couple making out in the tunnel and the people at the hairdressers are just a few examples of random scenes thrown together simply to introduce new victims for the blob to devour. It gets boring very quickly when there's no one for the audience to root for and get behind. Hell, I'd have even taken some awful characters who I wanted to see die a painful death. But there's no one of note here and no one is in the film long enough for audiences to care about them.
No longer a spoonful of jam throw onto a miniature set, the special effects for the blob here look reasonably convincing at times and definitely a preview of what could be achieved later with the 80s remake of the original. It's strange to see how much effort the special effects are presented with here, in comparison with the rest of the nonsense on display. The blob oozes through windows, doors, vents and anything else that it can trickle through, swallowing up people and props like nobody's business and is very much in line with how the creature acted in The Blob, even if looks a bit watery this time. There's no sense of menace though, despite the deaths in the film, and the blob never really comes off as threatening as it should do, partly due to the fact we don't care about anyone it's consuming.
Beware! The Blob does manage to pick up a little by the time the blob reaches the bowling alley but by then it's too late and the film has already sunk without much of a trace. If only they'd have cut out the silly comedy elements and focused more on the horror and thrills side of it. You get the feeling that neither Hagman, nor any of the writers, had seen the original and had only heard of it's cheesy reputation, leading them to the conclusion that it was a comedy horror and that this was to follow the same tone. Ironically, the film's best moment comes as one unlucky victim is engulfed whilst watching The Blob on television, breaking down the fourth wall and giving a wink to the audience.
Final Verdict
Beware! The Blob is a terrible sequel. It fails to capture any of the essence of the original (whether that was deliberately bad or not) and doesn't fit together well at all. It's a mess of randomly shot scenes thrown together with a big clump of goo killing everything in sight. Hagman clearly didn't know whether to do a homage to the original, a serious remake or simply a 70s version with hippies instead of rock 'n' roll rebels.
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Beware! The Blob Also Known As: Son of Blob Director(s): Larry Hagman Writer(s): Jack Woods (screenplay), Anthony Harris (screenplay), Richard Clair (story "A Chip Off the Old Blob"), Jack H. Harris (story) Actor(s): Robert Walker Jr., Gwynne Gilford, Richard Stahl, Richard Webb, Shelley Berman, Larry Hagman, Carol Lynley Duration: 87 mins |  |
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