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The Blob Movie Review

The Blob is a 1958 science fiction horror film directed by Irvin Yeaworth and starring Steve McQueen in his first feature film role. It’s a weak flick.

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“How do you get people to protect themselves

from something they don’t believe in?“

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A misunderstood teen fights to save his town from a gelatinous monster from outer space. This was yet another creature feature released in a decade full of them, but it’s not among the best of the bunch. It’s actually rather dated and tame by today’s standards.

The premise I admittedly really liked. To present an extraterrestrial being as this gelatinous blob is a sound idea that made this movie different from other films dealing with aliens. And the blob looked fine for the fifties. It even changed colors and shapes. But this is still jelly that we are talking about and jelly is not scary at all. But the depiction of an amoeboid life form was interesting to me as a biology enthusiast and we rarely see that in movies.

The acting is only serviceable. The female character was underdeveloped and uninteresting while the protagonist is also bland, though it was rather interesting seeing the very young Steve McQueen in his first movie role. The fact that he was trashed by the critics for his performance here is hilarious reading those reviews today as they didn’t realize that he would become a star.

A small town with a diner and very close communities definitely made for a charming story about Americana. That tone I really dug and it had that 50s horror atmosphere that worked. However, the problem here was that the horror scenes are not creepy at all, though they did execute them well visually speaking.

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The Blob for the most part was concerned with characters instead of the horror story and its creature, which was a disappointing choice as the characters were far from memorable and/or interesting to follow or care about. I wished for more SF elements as they were certainly there, but the movie hardly made proper use of them. The acting, directing and editing are all okay as was the cinematography, but the movie was cheap and it mostly looked like it, though the charm was intact.