The plot is fairly simple.\u00a0 A meteor crashes to Earth near a small town in the United States.\u00a0 An old man finds the impact crater and a spherical object within.\u00a0 The object breaks apart and inside is a blob of gelatinous material about the size of a baseball.\u00a0 He uses a stick to pick it up but eventually the blob latches onto his hand and starts to absorb his flesh.\u00a0 The old man wanders onto a nearby road almost overwhelmed by the agony he\u2019s in.\u00a0 A teenage couple in a car pick him up and bring him to a doctor\u2019s office.\u00a0 The doctor realizes that the man will need his arm amputated to save him from the quickly spreading mass devouring his arm.\u00a0 He calls his nurse to come and assist him while the teenage couple, Steve and Jane, go back to the scene of the accident to find out who the old man is.<\/p>\n
The nurse arrives but by this time the old man has been absorbed by the blob.\u00a0 While the doctor is getting his gun, the blob eats the nurse.\u00a0 He shoots the creature a couple of times with no effect.\u00a0 He locks himself in a room to call the police but the blob is able to squeeze under the locked door and attacks the doctor.\u00a0 At this point Steve and Jane have returned to the doctor\u2019s office and Steve is just in time to see the doctor digested by the blob through the window of the room the doctor is in.<\/p>\n
Now Steve and Jane attempt to get the police lieutenant \u201cDave\u201d to believe their story.\u00a0 Sgt. Bert tries to dissuade Dave from pursuing the investigation because he thinks the teenagers are pulling a prank on the police and after they go to the doctor\u2019s office and find nothing but knocked over furniture and a fired rifle the police are in doubt what to do.\u00a0 Jane and Steve are remanded into the custody of their parents and told to stay home and report back in the morning to figure out what was really going on.<\/p>\n
Steve and Jane sneak out of their homes and together with their teenage friends try to investigate what is going on.\u00a0 Meanwhile the blob wanders around town and eats a few more people without anyone being aware of its presence.\u00a0 Finally, Steve locates it in his father\u2019s supermarket.\u00a0 But the creature traps Steve and Jane in the refrigerated meat locker of the store.\u00a0 It begins oozing under the door but suddenly it retreats and leaves the store.<\/p>\n
Now convinced of the deadly nature of the blob the teenagers decide to wake the whole town by setting off fire and civil defense alarms to summon the townspeople to the town square.\u00a0 After Sgt. Bert berates them for a while Dave decides that he believes Steve and Jane.\u00a0 They head for the supermarket but Sgt. Bert precedes them and comes out of the empty supermarket mocking their story about a monster.\u00a0 Just then a terrific clamor breaks out as the patrons of the movie theater come stampeding out screaming.\u00a0 The blob has eaten the projectionist and absorbed about fifty of the viewers before they could escape in the crush.\u00a0 Now the blob is the size of a small house and headed down main street.<\/p>\n
By incredibly poor judgement Jane, Steve, Jane\u2019s annoying 6-year old brother Danny and the diner staff get trapped inside as the blob engulfs the small building.\u00a0 As the creature begins oozing into the crevices of the building Dave calls up the trapped inhabitants of the diner and tells them to get in the cellar while they try to electrocute the creature with a power line.\u00a0 Sgt. Bert proves himself useful for something when his sharpshooting abilities allows him to knock an overhanging power line down.\u00a0 But the creature is not effected by the current and all that is accomplished is now the building is on fire.<\/p>\n
As the fire infiltrates the cellar the diner owner starts using a CO2 fire extinguisher to put out the flames.\u00a0 But Steve notices that the blob retreats from the extinguisher.\u00a0 Remembering how the creature had retreated from the meat locker in the supermarket he figures out that the blob can\u2019t tolerate cold.\u00a0 Dave screams up the stairs in hopes that the phone is still connected to the police officers outside and tells them that the cold from CO2 fire extinguishers will force the blob to retreat.\u00a0 But the fire department that is on the scene only has four CO2 extinguishers and that will not be nearly enough to push the creature back and subdue it.\u00a0 Jane\u2019s father is the principal of the high school and he goes to the school with the teenagers to get the twenty extinguishers that the school has.\u00a0 When he gets there, he realizes he does not have the keys but proving he is a red-blooded American father he picks up a large stone and breaks the door window and breaks into his own school to save his children.<\/p>\n
The extinguishers work and the trapped humans are freed.\u00a0 Lieutenant Dave speaks to the Army and tells them to send a plane to dump the blob into the arctic where it will never thaw out.\u00a0 And that\u2019s just what they do.\u00a0 But the end title, \u201cThe End\u201d turns into a question mark!<\/p>\n
Okay, so what have we got here?\u00a0 Steve McQueen is a twenty-eight-year-old man pretending to be teenager Steve.\u00a0 That\u2019s a tough sell.\u00a0 Watching him golly gee wilikers around his girlfriend Jane is strange when I think that he is the Steve McQueen of Bullitt and Cincinnati Kid fame.\u00a0 But let\u2019s put that aside.\u00a0 The storyline and the acting are definitely passable for this genre.\u00a0 The teenagers hot-rodding around and the small-town cops hassling them is a staple of movies from this time.\u00a0 The cheesy special effects are also forgivable because of the technology of the time.\u00a0 So, the simple answer is this movie works.\u00a0 I remember seeing this on tv as a kid and thinking it was the height of sophisticated science fiction.\u00a0 So, it definitely succeeded with its audience of the time.\u00a0 How about today.\u00a0 Well I think the same audience would react almost as enthusiastically.\u00a0 Anyone under the age of ten will enjoy this movie.\u00a0 For the really old I found myself enjoying the nostalgia of an era where the teenagers weren\u2019t cretinous woke monsters but just ordinary teenagers enjoying a summer night in small town America.\u00a0 Your mileage may vary.<\/p>\n
As an aside, the actor who played the first victim of the blob, the old man, was Olin Howland, a character actor who also first saw the giant ants in Los Angeles during the movie \u201cThem.\u201d\u00a0 He was an alcoholic drying out in a psychiatric hospital when the Army interviews him about the giant ants he has seen in the dried river bed into which the sewers flow.\u00a0 He certainly got the plum roles.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The plot is fairly simple.\u00a0 A meteor crashes to Earth near a small town in the United States.\u00a0 An old man finds the impact crater<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[239,237,4,243],"tags":[43,2690,38,44,265,2619,2689],"class_list":["post-12396","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie-reviews","category-reviews","category-sff","category-sff-movie-reviews","tag-movie-review","tag-olin-howland","tag-review","tag-sci-fi","tag-science-fiction","tag-steve-mcqueen","tag-the-blob"],"yoast_head":"\n