BEWARE! THE BLOB (1972)
aka Son of Blob
Article 1917 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 6-14-2006
Posting Date: 11-11-2006
Directed by Larry Hagman
Featuring Robert Walker Jr., Gwynne Gilford, Richard Stahl

When one of the workers on an Alaskan highway returns home, he brings a sample of a substance he found with him. It turns out to be part of the Blob, which gets loose and begins another rampage.

I really feel a bit sorry for the reputation of the original THE BLOB ; though it wasn’t a bad little film by any means, it somehow gained a reputation as a one of the campier of the science fiction monster movies of the fifties. I think this is probably due to the nature of the monster itself combined with the silly Burt Bacharach theme song. In some ways, this movie suffered the same reputation as I WAS A TEENAGE WEREWOLF , which was also a decent movie but suffered from a silly title.

Maybe it was because of the unfortunate reputation of the original movie that Jack H. Harris, when it came time to film a sequel fourteen years later, decided to play it up for campy laughs. This movie is largely populated by comic characters, from the dumb sheriff to the pretentious barber and his hippie customer to the chatty boy scout leader to the hippie-hating drunks to the large, bald, naked Turk – these are a far cry from the serious characters from the original movie. And the fact of the matter is that these overtly comic scenes work better than the serious ones; the scene with the barber is particularly memorable. Its worst problem is that the young couple is nowhere near as appealing as the one from the original movie; the boyfriend is bland and forgettable, and the girl spends most of the movie in that whiny histrionic mode that I find intensely annoying. There’s also scads of familiar faces and names here; Larry Hagman (who also directs), Dick Van Patten, Burgess Meredith, Godfrey Cambridge, Carol Lynley, Cindy Williams, Gerrit Graham, Danny Goldman and Bud Cort all pop up at one point or another. Those who remember the early seventies will surely remember the toy that all the boy scouts are playing with here (though, sadly, the name of it escapes me). Fans of the original movie will certainly recognize both of the movies that Godfrey Cambridge watches at one point (though one is the audio track only). And I do find it highly amusing that Tiger Joe Marsh is first shown taking a bath in this one; he was the model for the original Mr. Clean.