Beware! The Blob! (1972)

The Blob returns--more outrageous than ever in this 1972 sequel to the popular sci-fi classic! Plenty of familiar faces, including Larry Hagman (who also directed), Burgess Meredith, Dick Van Patten, Robert Walker and Shelly Berman, add to the fun. A geologist (Godfrey Cambridge) unwittingly brings home an unusual frozen piece of debris from the North Pole. But when it accidentally thaws, the hungrier-than-ever blood-red Blob comes to life again, consuming nearly everyone in its path and terrorizing the town. No one is safe as it crawls into a bowling alley and oozes its way across an ice rink, becoming grotesquely bloated with the blood of its victims. Can this bizarre creature ever be stopped?!

Pure comic gold.

Beware! The Blob (Larry Hagman, 1972)

I was jaded very, very early. I used to boast to my grade-school pals that I could eat ham sandwiches while watching The Exorcist. (Remember, kiddies, when I was in grade school, The Exorcist was still in theaters.) Movies just don't scare me. With, that is, a few notable, and mostly entirely unjustifiable, exceptions. Beware! The Blob is one of those. I didn't sleep voluntarily for months after I first saw this movie on the Friday late-night creature feature. To this day, I have no idea what it was that scared the tar out of me so badly thirty years ago. Now it's a whole other story; Dick van Patten's acting is a large part of it, to be sure.

The story: a geologist (Godfrey Cambridge, best remembered these days as Gravedigger Jones) brings back a sample from above the arctic circle (funny, I thought they took the beast the other way in the Steve McQueen movie...). Through various bits of forgetfulness, the sample is left to thaw on the counter, and the blob gets out to wreak havoc on another small town. Lisa Clark (Satan's School for Girls' Gwynne Gilford) stops in to see Chester just as the blob is devouring him, having already finished off his family, and goes screaming to her boyfriend Bobby (Easy Rider's Robert Walker) and the cops, neither of whom believe there's a big one-celled eating machine on the loose until, of course, it's entirely too late.

Now, I will start off by saying that, yes, this is an entirely awful movie. Technically, there is not a single redeeming quality about it. The acting sucks. The directing sucks. The lighting sucks. The special effects suck. The sets suck, which is pretty impressive given the number of location shots. The entire movie sucks, well and truly. But that is part of its considerable charm, for it pushes through the envelope of suck and achieves that cheesy greatness that so few films manage. Dick van Patten's obsessive Scoutmaster is pure comic gold. A couple of hobos who end up being lunchmeat for the blob are played by (director) Larry Hagman and an uncredited Burgess Meredith. Carol Lynley, Shelley Berman, Bud Cort, Byron Keith, Randy Stonehill (yes, that Randy Stonehill, playing a pot-crazed free-love-type guitarist), Gerrit Graham... it's as much fun playing spot-the-cameo as it is trying to figure out how badly the next scene is going to mangle the fifties monster-movie tropes it never even attempts to break out of.

I grant you, you have to have a certain special sense of humor to really grasp the greatness of Beware! The Blob. If, however, you recognize Night of the Lepus as the timeless piece of filmmaking it truly is, then I cannot recommend Beware! The Blob highly enough for your refined palate. An absolute keeper. **
January 3, 2008

Beware the Blob

More than satisfied with the product & the delivery time.I will continue to deal with Amazon. May 13, 2007

If you want to get a good laugh at the Move that JR Shot...

When I was a kid, I loved horror movies. I even collected those monster trading cards. There was only one movie that scared me and that was Beware! The Blob! I don't know exactly why it scared me. So I waited and waited expecting it to come on tv again after all these years. So I figured, buy it and get a kick out of it. So if you want to get a movie just to get a good enjoyable laugh check it out. Larry Hagman did a good job as director in the flick. January 5, 2007

Watch the 1988 remake instead....

Though advertised on the back of the box art as a "sequel" to the 1958 film The Blob, this film is in no way a sequel but esentually a remake. Beware! The Blob is as much a sequel to the original Blob as the 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers is to the original. There is no mention of the events of the original film what-so-ever. Now that we got that out of the way lets talk about Beware! The Blob. The premise of a 70's remake of the original sounds exciting, but sadly this film does not live up to expectations. First off Beware! The Blob is terribly shot and directed., which hence gives the film a very amaturish feel. Many of the pull back camera shots are shaky and there seems to be no flair in Larry Hageman's direction. The story also has its problems. First of all is how the Blob is brought into the story. Some man in the begining that is a geologist (though this character definitly does not fit the role( supposidly finds a "sample" his crew dug up in the ground and stores it in his freezer. Naturally it thaws and the "blob" is unleashed The problem is that no hwere in teh story is there talk of it being "alien" or "human made" like in the other two fersions of the film (One in 1958 and 1988). The blob is just there! The story also has many useless moments and senarios. Take the boy scout senerio for instance. There is no point to these scenes with the boy scouts outher than to fill up time. Also many of hte characters just stupidly throw themselvesat the blob. One cop shoots, try's to flee, falls, then is eaten. One guy even has the gale to drive his car into the blob even when he ovviously sees it from a far away distance. These characters drove me nuts!! Director Larry Hagman also doesn't know whether to treat this as a straight horror film or a spoof of the genre. Htere are many scenes that are scary and suspensful (such as when the blob covers a car with occumpents trapped inside) but there are also many scenes of shear campyness that throws the movie off balence. hte music score was also quit terrible and actually ruins what are supposed to be suspensful scenes. The special effects aen't too bad, especially for the time, but many of them are quite outdated. This film is also not aided by the numerous bad titles it is under. Beware! The Blob...come on. This was also released as Son of Blob (that was the title of it when I first saw it), which is actually worse than the title Beware! The Blob. If you liked the original Blob, you might want to tcheck this film out just for kicks by renting it or buying it real cheap. Otherwise your best bet is to go for the 1988 remake. May 5, 2004

Blob vs Hippies

Cindy Williams, Shelley Berman, Dick van Patten, Burgess Meredith and other familiar faces get together in this direct sequel to the original Steve McQueen movie. The original blob was taken to the frozen north. An oil worker finds something strange in the permafrost and brings it home where his wife doesn't want it in the freezer. Well, it thaws, and after a fly and a kitten, the creature moves on to human prey.

This is a strange film with camp pushed to its limits. Nothing is safe from the creature in this small town and nothing is same from the film makers. Hippies, hairdos, hobos, and the strangest barber since Monty Python's Michael Palin are just the tip of the iceberg is this strange film. There is even a clip from a certain Steve McQueen film. It fits into the blob scenarios the same way that Godzilla vs The Smog Monster fits with the rest of the Godzilla films.

The effects are pretty good (foreshadowing those of the remake) but the acting and pacing make it more like a sketch comedy version. This is like a case of the moth and the flame, you know it is bad for you but you are still drawn to it. Check it out. May 4, 2004

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