Editorials
[It Came From the ‘80s] The Gruesome Demise of the Would-Be Hero in ‘The Blob’
It Came From the ‘80s is a series that pays homage to the monstrous, deadly, and often slimy creatures that made the ‘80s such a fantastic decade in horror.
A quick look back at horror’s output in the ‘80s puts one recurring argument among fans to rest; horror remakes don’t always suck. There’s a hardy number of solid horror remakes that prove their worth. The Thing, The Fly, Cat People, to name a few. And of course, The Blob. The latter received a smaller theatrical release, treated more like an indie feature, so it took a lot longer to find its well-deserved audience. Now, The Blob sits among the best horror remakes of all time, for many good reasons. But high among them is the shocking, early death of the hero.
The 1958 original film opened with Steve McQueen’s plucky teen character, Steve, on a date with his love interest Jane (Aneta Corsaut). Their makeout session is interrupted by a passing meteorite overhead, and Steve is determined to find where it landed. On their way, he narrowly avoids running down an older man in the road, who had beaten him to the meteorite and gotten its jelly-like substance stuck on his hand. They rush him to the hospital, where the thing feasts on the man, growing in size and embarking on a feeding frenzy across town.
If you’ve seen the 1988 remake, then you know that the first act adheres pretty strictly to the original. Donovan Leitch plays Paul, a high school football player with a heart of gold. His lady love is Meg Penny (Shawnee Smith), and their first date is interrupted by an older man in the middle of the road, a globule of goo affixed to his hand. Co-writers Frank Darabont and Chuck Russell borrowed a trick from Psycho, though, to pull the rug out from under viewers by the end of the first act; Paul isn’t the Steve McQueen character of this film at all. Meg is. They announce it by killing Paul off in a disturbing, gnarly way. The type of death that made you realize no one would be safe here.
Poor Meg discovers Paul tucked away in the doctor’s office, almost wholly enveloped in the Blob. As it’s dragging him toward the open window, he’s reaching for her while screaming in terror and pain. Only his right arm is untouched, and in Meg’s attempts to pull him free, well, the arm is severed by digestive acids, and Meg falls backward, knocking herself unconscious against the wall. Paul is dissolved alive in the stomach acids of the creature. His death was an elaborate and intricate scene that special makeup and animatronic effects designer Tony Gardner (Zombieland, Freaked, The Return of the Living Dead) saved for last. Specifically, so he and his team could apply every single thing they’d learned during production to ensure it looked great.
When the Blob first crashes on Earth, it’s a pale, translucent thing. The more it devours humans, the pinker it becomes from all the blood consumed. While it digests soft tissue with ease, bone, teeth, and hair take much longer. It’s with this in mind that Gardner and his “Blob Shop” team approached Paul’s death. Some of this scene utilized miniatures from Dream Quest Images. As for the rest, Gardner concocted multiple stages of movement and Paul’s deterioration. It required a collage of techniques that included vacu-form plastic, plexiglass, bladders, and rotating rigs that stretch and pull to give a sense of movement, along with a metal rig for the actor to sit in while the Blob draped over it all.
As for the poor soul getting digested, the victim began as pale and blotchy, then his face started to stretch and become bruised, and eventually winds up a sliding face floating in the gelatinous creature. The detached face was a mechanical element with eyes rigged to roll back into the skull. Paul’s leftover, undigested arm was simply a crew member’s arm stuck through a hole in the floor. The Blob itself was, for the most part, was comprised of what the crew dubbed a “Blob Quilt.” Layers of silk sewn together with pockets and injected with methylcellulose, a food stabilizer and thickener used in things like veggie meat or gravy. The methylcellulose would ooze through the silk framework, hiding it completely, as puppeteers manipulated what appeared to be a fluid blob with precision.
That Paul’s death is only the first of many notable deaths speaks volumes on the film’s enduring quality. Russell and Darabont’s script, under Russell’s direction, complete with a fantastic cast and innovative, practical effects come together to make The Blob an all-time great. In Psycho, Alfred Hitchcock shocked audiences to their core with the brutal, early stabbing of Marion Crane. Russell and Darabont made this trick their own by reserving one of the most brutal deaths of all for the definitive nice guy bearing all the typical traits of a hero. If the hero can’t even survive the first act, then the odds aren’t looking so hot for the rest of the town.
Luckily, they had one pissed off cheerleader in Meg Penny.
The problem with filming sequels back-to-back is that, unless you can afford expensive reshoots, there’s no easy way to adjust course in between movies if fans react badly to where the story is headed. That’s why it’s important to have a complete narrative thought out well in advance lest you accidentally kill a budding franchise.
However, this isn’t always the case. Every once in a while, it seems like the cinema gods smile upon certain chaotic productions and gift moviegoers with complete franchises that feel like more than the sum of their hastily produced parts. Ted Nicolaou’s Bloodlust: Subspecies III is precisely one of these miraculous pictures, with the raw talents of the artists involved (as well as the continued support from Romania) turning the feature into an effective conclusion for a series that kind of made things up as the filmmakers went along.
That’s why I’d like to invite my fellow readers to join me on this third part of our journey through the Subspecies franchise as we look into Bloodlust and talk about how it remains a surprisingly satisfying finale to the original trilogy.
A Trilogy Planned on the Fly
Released only a year after Bloodstone found plenty of success in rental stores and mail-in VHS catalogues worldwide, 1994’s Bloodlust was produced at the same time as its predecessor in (mostly) the same locations and with the same team. This means that the movie benefited from all the same upgrades as Bloodstone, with the crew now being more experienced with the ins and outs of surviving a low-budget Romanian production and the cast really settling into their characters.
At this point, everything from location scouting to the makeup process had been streamlined, with Wayne Toth and Norman Cabrera, the main duo behind special effects, even switching out time-consuming prosthetics for latex gloves in order to speed up Anders Hove’s monstrous transformation. The titular “subspecies” demons were also once again relegated to a mere cameo appearance due to the laborious puppetry required to bring them to life.
The only real hiccup came from the fact that actress Denice Duff had replaced the first film’s Michelle (Laura Mae Tate) and was immediately expected to portray the character as both an innocent victim in part II and as a secondary villain in part III. According to behind-the-scenes interviews, the hectic production schedule that blended two different movies meant that Duff would often find herself having to alternate between two incredibly different versions of Michelle during the same shooting day – though it’s obvious that she’s having more fun with Bloodlust’s more traditionally vampiric version of her character.
In the finished film, we pick things up immediately where the previous entry left off as Rebecca (Melanie Shatner) is forced to leave her vampire sister Michelle (Duff) behind in the dungeons of Castle Vladislav due to the rising sun. This allows Mummy (Pamela Gordon) to use Michelle’s blood to revive the vicious Radu (Hove) so that he may continue his quest for the coveted Bloodstone – a magical artifact that perpetually drips the Blood of Saints.
Meanwhile, the dreamy US embassy agent Mel (Kevin Blair) agrees to help Rebecca plan a rescue mission, though they’re unaware that Radu has become infatuated with Michelle during his attempts to guide her growing bloodlust. This all culminates in a climactic confrontation meant to tie up all of the series’ loose ends in one of Full Moon Pictures’ most ambitious productions.
The Evolution of Radu
Like its predecessor, Bloodlust: Subspecies III was also warmly received by fans who argued that the series was an even bigger success than Full Moon’s other major horror franchise, Puppet Master. This praise wasn’t unanimous, however, as 1994 had seen the rise of a more modern breed of sexy vampire popularized by Anne Rice, with old-school Nosferatu like Radu being viewed as obsolete when compared to the likes of Lestat and Gary Oldman’s take on Dracula.
In a way, one might argue that Nicolaou’s film is something of a swan song for the classic vampire story, as Bloodlust combines all of the traditional elements we tend to associate with these tales into a single tragic yarn that ties a neat little bow on Radu’s story as well as the old-fashioned monster movies that he represents. The finale remains shocking despite the fact that this is the third time we see Radu get brutally killed onscreen, with the brief tease that he may one day return feeling more like a nod towards the nature of evil rather than sequel bait.
The film dabbles a bit in gothic romance and even explores the inherent power fantasy behind transforming into an immortal creature of the night, but the filmmakers never lose sight of Radu as a demonic force even when he’s willing to betray his beloved Mummy for Michelle’s sake. In fact, his twisted “love” for his fledgling makes him even creepier as we get the feeling that his passion comes from a dark and disturbing place.
Anders Hove is at his absolute best in this film, with the effects department boosting his moments of what the younger generation would call “aura farming” whenever Radu emerges from shadows like a 90s version of Count Orlok. There are even a couple of surprisingly effective jump-scares here, which is why I’d argue that Bloodlust cements Radu as one of the most memorable cinematic vampires of all time despite his humble origins.
Subspecies Saves Its Best For Last
Nicolaou and Vlad Panescu also saved the best for “last” (more on that in a bit) regarding the film’s visuals, with the cinematography and overall atmosphere of Bloodlust absolutely surpassing what we saw in the previous films. Everything feels appropriately climactic this time around (including the wonderful soundtrack that was co-composed alongside an authentic Romanian orchestra), and I appreciate how this is the fastest-paced entry in the trilogy since the film doesn’t need to waste time setting anything up.
Bloodlust still suffers from some of the same low-budget blemishes as its predecessors, but there’s so much creative passion here that no amount of wonky effects work or stilted dialogue can get in the way of appreciating the flick’s gothic grandeur. That’s why it’s not surprising that the movie’s definitive(-ish) ending would later be retconned as fans begged for more Radu.
Of course, the next entry in this series would be a different kind of vampiric endeavor altogether, with the filmmakers attempting to engage with the same trends that ultimately killed Radu and his antiquated kin. That, however, is a story for another time. For now, I’ll merely insist that Bloodlust: Subspecies III remains a highlight of Full Moon’s expansive catalogue and is definitely worth seeking out today.
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