Off My Shelf: Beware! The Blob (1972)... A Mystifying Experience.
So, I've got this copy of Journey to the Center of the Earth on our shelf that I don't want to watch. To delay watching that movie, we flipped through Amazon Prime until we found a truly puzzling offering: "Beware! The Blob" (1972).
Directed by Larry Hagman (of Dallas fame). His one and only directorial exploit. Featuring Burgess Meredith and a handful of people whose names you don't know, but you'll probably recognize if you watch a lot of 1970's-era TV.
In case you're wondering who shot J.R. -- IT WAS THE BLOB!I like the original film, The Blob -- it's a very simple movie, but enjoyable. It very much set up the framework for what "giant monster" movies were going to become. But, oddly, I had never ever heard of this film -- Beware! The Blob.
So, we gave it a try.
The plot involves a guy (just "a guy") who accidentally brings back a sample of the original blob from the frozen tundra where it had been taken. (Although, I suppose it isn't really the original Blob, because at one point one of the characters in this film is watching the original film version of The Blob on TV. This...doesn't make any sense. Is this a sequel or not?! Unclear). The Blob sample unfreezes and menaces this small town (eating a kitten and some hippies along the way. And yes, this is the first horror movie I've seen where the first victim is a cute kitten.)
LOOK OUT, KITTY!I think this film is supposed to be a horror-comedy, but I can't go any further without saying this: I've never seen a movie that felt so completely improvised, nor a movie that felt improvised so exceptionally poorly.
There are films like Waiting for Guffman that are almost wholly improvised, and improvised TV shows like Curb Your Enthusiasm, too; the big difference between those offerings and and this one being that those types of stories are improvised around a "framework" that basically tells the cast exactly what was going to happen, who they are and why they were doing things. That's why Curb Your Enthusiasm feels like a real TV show -- why the stories seem to have plots and why they move from one logical place to another.
In this film, it feels like two actors showed up for a scene, are told, "Okay, waste ten minutes of time... and then the Blob kills you. GO!" ("Can I put on a gorilla suit?" "Yeah, sure, whatever!")
The man in the gorilla suit (no, I wasn't kidding) is played by
Gerrit Graham ("Beef!") of Phantom of the Paradise fame.
(I need to talk about that movie at length some other time...)That's how you get three scenes where our hero describes to our heroine the avocado-and-sprouts sandwich that he wants to make for her. (One version has bacon, one does not.) That's why we have an lengthy scene of a man getting a bizarrely sensual scalp massage at the barber shop. That's why there's a scene of a man removing flowers from a vase and then pouring beer into it to make a mega beer. That's why there's a long scene of two hippies sitting in a drainage ditch, smoking weed and yelling incomprehensibly. That's why there's an entire sub-plot about our heroes accidentally knocking a man's beers over on different occasions.
Uh oh.... I see some beers about to fall over! HILARIOUS!Even more confusing, this movie features involvement by famed improvisation teacher Del Close. ("Del P. Close was an American actor, writer, and teacher who coached many of the best-known comedians and comic actors of the late twentieth century," -Wikipedia).
Did I mention Dick Van Patten is also in this movie for about
a minute and a half? He seems to know our heroine, although
I'm not sure how. And I don't know what happens to him... I assume he was
eaten by the blob off-screen.And somehow he's involved in this film that features some of the lamest improvisation I've ever seen in my life. Del Close even appears in a single scene where he, Larry Hagman and Burgess Meredith improvise a trio of farmhand-hoboes who have some weird exchanges about booze. It makes no sense.
In the end, Beware! The Blob doesn't feel like a real movie. For that reason, then, I basically couldn't stop watching -- I kept thinking that it would start making sense, or that it would start feeling like a real movie at some point.
That never happened.
There is nothing that I can say that will explain how extremely strange, disjointed or bizarre Beware! The Blob is. But in a weird kind of way, I actually enjoyed this movie. I found it engaging, laughed at how terribly bad and unfunny a lot of things in it were, and liked the rather cheesy special effects. And the very end of the film was MASSIVELY DUMB -- so there was a lot of laughing (although not for the reasons the filmmakers intended).
This is another film that I would recommend you to watch with your friends on "bad movie night" -- but, please, DO NOT watch this film if you want or need a competent or coherent film experience!
RECOMMENDED!Good Bad Movie
Directed by Larry Hagman (of Dallas fame). His one and only directorial exploit. Featuring Burgess Meredith and a handful of people whose names you don't know, but you'll probably recognize if you watch a lot of 1970's-era TV.
In case you're wondering who shot J.R. -- IT WAS THE BLOB!I like the original film, The Blob -- it's a very simple movie, but enjoyable. It very much set up the framework for what "giant monster" movies were going to become. But, oddly, I had never ever heard of this film -- Beware! The Blob.So, we gave it a try.
The plot involves a guy (just "a guy") who accidentally brings back a sample of the original blob from the frozen tundra where it had been taken. (Although, I suppose it isn't really the original Blob, because at one point one of the characters in this film is watching the original film version of The Blob on TV. This...doesn't make any sense. Is this a sequel or not?! Unclear). The Blob sample unfreezes and menaces this small town (eating a kitten and some hippies along the way. And yes, this is the first horror movie I've seen where the first victim is a cute kitten.)
LOOK OUT, KITTY!I think this film is supposed to be a horror-comedy, but I can't go any further without saying this: I've never seen a movie that felt so completely improvised, nor a movie that felt improvised so exceptionally poorly.There are films like Waiting for Guffman that are almost wholly improvised, and improvised TV shows like Curb Your Enthusiasm, too; the big difference between those offerings and and this one being that those types of stories are improvised around a "framework" that basically tells the cast exactly what was going to happen, who they are and why they were doing things. That's why Curb Your Enthusiasm feels like a real TV show -- why the stories seem to have plots and why they move from one logical place to another.
In this film, it feels like two actors showed up for a scene, are told, "Okay, waste ten minutes of time... and then the Blob kills you. GO!" ("Can I put on a gorilla suit?" "Yeah, sure, whatever!")
The man in the gorilla suit (no, I wasn't kidding) is played byGerrit Graham ("Beef!") of Phantom of the Paradise fame.
(I need to talk about that movie at length some other time...)That's how you get three scenes where our hero describes to our heroine the avocado-and-sprouts sandwich that he wants to make for her. (One version has bacon, one does not.) That's why we have an lengthy scene of a man getting a bizarrely sensual scalp massage at the barber shop. That's why there's a scene of a man removing flowers from a vase and then pouring beer into it to make a mega beer. That's why there's a long scene of two hippies sitting in a drainage ditch, smoking weed and yelling incomprehensibly. That's why there's an entire sub-plot about our heroes accidentally knocking a man's beers over on different occasions.
Uh oh.... I see some beers about to fall over! HILARIOUS!Even more confusing, this movie features involvement by famed improvisation teacher Del Close. ("Del P. Close was an American actor, writer, and teacher who coached many of the best-known comedians and comic actors of the late twentieth century," -Wikipedia).
Did I mention Dick Van Patten is also in this movie for abouta minute and a half? He seems to know our heroine, although
I'm not sure how. And I don't know what happens to him... I assume he was
eaten by the blob off-screen.And somehow he's involved in this film that features some of the lamest improvisation I've ever seen in my life. Del Close even appears in a single scene where he, Larry Hagman and Burgess Meredith improvise a trio of farmhand-hoboes who have some weird exchanges about booze. It makes no sense.
In the end, Beware! The Blob doesn't feel like a real movie. For that reason, then, I basically couldn't stop watching -- I kept thinking that it would start making sense, or that it would start feeling like a real movie at some point.
That never happened.
There is nothing that I can say that will explain how extremely strange, disjointed or bizarre Beware! The Blob is. But in a weird kind of way, I actually enjoyed this movie. I found it engaging, laughed at how terribly bad and unfunny a lot of things in it were, and liked the rather cheesy special effects. And the very end of the film was MASSIVELY DUMB -- so there was a lot of laughing (although not for the reasons the filmmakers intended).
This is another film that I would recommend you to watch with your friends on "bad movie night" -- but, please, DO NOT watch this film if you want or need a competent or coherent film experience!
RECOMMENDED!Good Bad Movie
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