eatnik jazz-rock pours from the screen over the credits, which are displayed against wavery lozenges that might have been called "psychedelic" 10 years later. A singer eventually comes in to warn us in syncopated fashion to "beware of the Blob," and then we dissolve to a closeup of a kiss. The kiss is occurring between teenagers Steve Andrews (McQueen) and Jane Martin (Corsaut), who are parked in a convertible at a spot favored by Steve for watching shooting stars. As they banter about romance, they see a meteor crash to earth not far away, and set off after it. We cut to the home of a hermit/farmer and his little dog. The farmer (Olin Howlin) has also heard the meteor impact and sets out to explore. He finds the outer-space fragment in a pit, and pokes it with a stick. The meteor cracks, and some ooze from inside climbs the stick, and then the farmer's arm. He writhes in pain and stumbles off.
Frustrated in their quest to locate the meteor, Steve and Jane are driving back to town when they intersect the path of the Blob-encrusted farmer. They haul him considerately into town, to the offices of Dr. Hallen (Chase), then spontaneously indulge in a drag race with some friendly rival teens. Meanwhile, the Doc feels there is no recourse save to amputate the farmer's alien-sheathed arm. He summons his nurse, but on the point of operating, they discover their patient has been totally absorbed. The much-larger Blob now devours the nurse and Doc Hallen, a procedure partially witnessed by a returning Steve.
Now the police become involved, as Steve and Jane frantically strive to convince the authorities of the danger facing the town (seemingly called Downingtown). But they meet with disbelief and are sent home to bed in the care of their parents. They sneak out later, however, and continue their search, ending up at the grocery store owned by Steve's dad. Inside, they have their first face-to-face contact with the Blob, escaping it only by hiding in the meat locker. The Blob seems to be repelled by cold, although Steve does not make the deduction immediately.
Leaving the market, they corral their friends and awake the whole town with sirens. Even then, the teens are having a hard time making their case—until the local theater, in the midst of a midnight showing of a Bela Lugosi movie, is invaded by the Blob, sending a panicked crowd streaming out. Now the enormous Blob—having eaten some 40 people—traps Steve, Jane and her little brother Danny in a diner for the climactic showdown. A chance application of a frosty blast from a CO2 extinguisher reveals to Steve how to repel the space beast, and the Blob is eventually driven into hibernation and airlifted into the arctic wilderness. We close out with the ever-popular teaser, "THE END?".
This was one red menace that wasn't
Whereas 1956's Invasion of the Body Snatchers provided a chilling and masterful allegory for all the fears of insidious outsider invasion that America endured during the 1950s, the release two years later of The Blob proved that not just any old alien menace could stand in for spreading communism or conformity. If any such subtext was intended by the filmmakers—and the Blob's lurid red coloration surely evokes Soviet symbolism—it falls as flat as the Blob itself, when compressing its bulk to slip under doors and through heating vents.
First off, as a singular invader, the Blob is too unique to convey the sense of a mass onslaught of mindless commies. It appears more as a freakish, one-off disaster akin to a tornado or avalanche. Secondly, the Blob, as rendered in the script and by SFX guy Bart Sloane, is just too pitiful and meager a threat. A big enough Tupperware container would serve to imprison the slow-moving, slug-like entity, which relies on the cover of night to grab its victims. By day, it would be no more dangerous than a beached jellyfish. Putting aside the failure of the titular monster to embody any larger concerns, it still fails as a lone assailant.
What of the other issues in the film? The main theme aside from the invasion is one of the generation gap. The wild and crazy kids are privy to a valuable knowledge that they just can't get their square elders to dig. But this theme falls apart on two counts. First, the advanced ages and appearances of the "teenage" actors (McQueen was 28 years old!) makes the premise appear ridiculous onscreen. Second, the "rebellion" of the "teens" is so lame as to make them look—at least by today's lights—like hardcore members of the establishment. Forced to come up with an epithet against one of the unbelieving cops, the biggest insult they can summon up is to call him "Bert the snert!" Recall that the gritty story of The Wild One had already appeared five years earlier. But here we have only Bowery-Boys-level verisimilitude.
McQueen does give a superior performance as a serious, scientific-minded, often scared individual. It's easy to see why this film marked his breakout into stardom. The supporting players are generally adequate, with Earl Rowe turning in a good performance as the sympathetic cop, Lt. Dave. The scenes in the grocery are actually thrilling, with Steve vaulting a wall of canned goods to rescue Jane. And the hanging sides of meat in the freezer offer a wry symbolic note: We're all just meat for the Blob. Also of note is the inventive time scheme of the film, which crams all the action into a single night. Although some of the day-for-night photography is unconvincing, and occasional improbable events (two mechanics still repairing cars at midnight?) intrude. Hypothetically, the Blob might be seen as a forerunner of the nanotech "gray goo" catastrophe, kind of a proto-Blood Music, but even this generous interpretation is a bit of a stretch for a film that has more than a few plot holes, is awfully corny (kids and dogs in jeopardy must have seemed ancient even in 1958) and is generally stiffer than a Blob-sicle.
