• Understanding Autism from the Inside

    “Academics came easily to me. The rest of life—not so much.”
  • This post may contain affiliate links and we may earn compensation when you click on the links at no additional cost to you.

Monster Movie: The Blob (1988) review

What do you do when you must watch cheesy 80’s horror movies on Friday night?  You torture a few 14-year-old boys too!  Convincing my son and his friend to watch the film with me was easy, getting these two to shut up for even a single second of the movie not so much!

I must say that the movie started out pretty funny.  These teenagers cackled about the early scene in the pharmacy when the teenager purchased condoms and blamed his friend.  Who turned up at the pharmacist’s house to date his daughter.  The guys nearly fell off the sofa.  Ok, it was funny.

Back to the movie:

There were many “oh, crap,” moments throughout the movie. The Blob was an effective monster in that way.  But, I had difficulty understand the monster.  It grew exponentially and didn’t seem to have any “rules” per se.  Yes, it was susceptible to cold, but beyond that how did it function exactly.  Was it eating people?  Absorbing them, melting them with acid?  There seemed to conflict scenes.

The old man, patient zero, was in the hospital with his lower half disintegrated.  Next victim, Paul Taylor was eaten/absorbed?  The creature, instead of just going on a rampage retreats and then reappears in pipes, air conditioner vents, sewers. Sometimes it appeared to melt matter or have the power to snap firearms to pull its victims through manholes.  But this “ability” was not always present.  So that was weird.

A few convenient coincidences stuck out.  Why in the world was there a brick in the diner kitchen?  Oh, that right, so the characters can use it to break the window.  The brick just didn’t feel like it was in a natural location.  Later, Brian Flagg, town bad boy was conveniently riding his bike through a tunnel and saved Meg from the sewer.  Sure, ok, we can go with that.

Overall the movie was entertaining.  The monster was horrendous and terrorized the town.  But the ending I found silly.  Did we need that ending shot with the reverend waiting to release another blob?  Where did that come from?  It seemed like right out of left field. There was no hint of that coming.  This ending is an example of a twist that was not at all set up.  Sure it was a surprise all right, one that made no sense and had no foreshadowing.  And, it added nothing good to the story.

 

Jeannie Davide-Rivera

Jeannie is an award-winning author, the Answers.com Autism Category Expert, contributes to Autism Parenting Magazine, and the Thinking Person's Guide to Autism. She lives in New York with her husband and four sons, on the autism spectrum.

2 Comments:

  1. I can live with the brick in the kitchen. Sure, it’s implausible, maybe the building used to be brick and its left over from a renovation…or something. What I found more farfetched was that the town just happened to have a snow truck. I didn’t even know those were a real thing until a trip to Wikipedia. Apparently, they’re quite common in resort towns, which this town did not strike me as.

    And I have to agree that the preacher thing did come out of nowhere. There is some foreshadowing, we see him pick up the frozen Blob crystal, it was just…really clumsy. I also didn’t quite get his transformation because of how little he’s shown. I’m pretty sure in the movie you bump into him at the pharmacy for comedic effects, he stumbles on the crystal, then he shows up when the Blob is attacking the town all crazy, gets burned, and goes even crazier. That’s him in every scene. I also found his preaching fairly comedic in comparing the attack to scripture in the Bible. I’m fairly certain there’s nothing about amorphous blobs falling from the sky and devouring people in the New Testament. If there is I might start going to church.

  2. You bring up a great point about the ending. I also thought it just seemed completely random. The reverend is shown throughout the film, but it isn’t like he is a main character, and the fact that he keeps some of the blog was just strange. I didn’t understand what that really added to the film. This is a great example of a random twist that isn’t well set up or executed.

Comments are closed

  • Autism Family Travels at Passportsandpushpins.com

    [instagram-feed]