Back in the 80's, there was a whole slew of good monster movies, and every major star was getting in on the action. The Blob was made back in 1988, when Kevin Dillon and Shawnee Smith were at the height of their movie careers, and Kevin Dillon was the coolest thing since pez dispensers. I think Kevin Dillon was even elected President at one point. I could be wrong, my memory of the 80's is a little hazy. Well it was either him or Arnold Shwarzenegger, one of the two. Nowadays, Shawnee Smith is doing bit parts in The Grudge 3, and no one knows who Kevin Dillon is. I think he handed me my Double Down from KFC the other day, and I went "Was that Kevin Dillon?" but then I opened my Double Down and forgot all about him.
So Kevin, otherwise known as Flagg in this movie (no, he's not the guy from the Stand), is a bike-riding rebellious young teen just short of his 18th birthday. We first see him trying to jump his motorcycle across a broken bridge over a ravine, but his bike is having engine troubles and he ends up face-planting into the ravine. Some old guy collecting tin cans has a cackle over it, and then Flagg hitches a ride back into town to get some ratchets to fix his bike. Flagg is the classic 80's anti-hero, leather-jacket-wearing, jeans-clad, and sporting such a coiffed and feathered 80's hairdo that Farrah Fawcett was probably jealous at the time.
Meanwhile, the homeless old man, who had a good laugh over Flagg taking a dive into the dirt, nearly gets his head seared off by a falling meteor. He goes to investigate and finds this purple-pink gelatinous slime that quickly gloms onto his hand and begins eating away the flesh. The old guy runs off into the woods to find his hatchet so he can cut off his hand and scares the shit out of Flagg, who watches him take a whack at his own hand with the hatchet, but the first blow fails to cut the hand off clean and the slime just slides up his arm to cover the wound and absorb the spurting blood. Flagg chases after him, trying to help him, but the old guy runs into the road and gets clipped by a car driven by Shawnee Smith's boyfriend, who has assumed the title of "Deadmeat" for this movie. Deadmeat is a high school quarterback, Shawnee's a cheerleader, and Deadmeat and Flagg have an instant disliike for each other. But Shawnee's cheerleader sensibilities prevail, or maybe it was her high school cheer-girl body, and they combine their powers to form VOLTRON, Defender of the Universe! Errrr... wait, no no. They all get in the car to get the old guy to the hospital, yea. There's no Voltron in this movie, dammit. So Flagg leaves them to admit the old guy, and the old guy is finally devoured by the slime while the asshole doctor is somewhere jerking off, and then Deadmeat quickly follows him into the abyss of death.
After that, it's every man, woman and child for itself as the slime devours everyone and everything in its path, and begins growing at a geometric rate! :-o I'm not sure what that means but Geometry sounds like math and whenever math and monsters are involved, shit just got serious. It's up to Flagg to rescue everyone with his fancy motorbike while not getting a hair out of place!
Shawnee Smith, meanwhile, gets to slog her way through a sewer. Why did the 80's hate women so much?
This movie, while being a typical 80's monster movie, benefitted by the late 80's return to the important values of making good goddamn movies, and there's no shortage of special effects here. In fact, I am pretty sure whatever money was left after making sure Kevin's hair was perfect went towards making the monster look good. There's only one scene that looks a little hokey and seems badly done, when Flagg and Shawnee are in a diner and the slime drags the short-order cook through a drainpipe. The view goes from the drainpipe bulging to the slime flowing across the ceiling after Kevin and Shawnee with almost no indication of how it got up there, and it looks pretty obvious that the actors and the slime aren't in the same shot. Other than that, the rest of the movie goes off without a hitch.
Needless to say, I've seen this movie before. It passes the rewatchability test, but barely. I could certainly go without seeing it again for a good few years, so hopefully by next Halloween I have a better DVD collection. Crackle.com managed to get its act together enough for me to view this one on their website, and damned if they didn't remember how far I got watching it this afternoon and pick up where I left off this evening, so whatever they are doing it seems to be working. Still, I ordered some DVD's to make up the rest of the week just in case AMC or TCM fail to show anything really spooky in the next week.
Five days to go! :-)
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