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.
Due to a complex series of anthropological mishaps, the Wayans Brothers are a huge deal in Brazil. Around these parts, White Chicks is considered a national treasure by a lot of people, so it stands to reason that Brazilian audiences would continue to accompany the Wayans’ comedic output long after North America had stopped taking them seriously as comedic titans.
This is the only reason why I originally watched Michael Tiddes and Marlon Wayans’ 2013 horror spoof A Haunted House – appropriately known as “Paranormal Inactivity” in South America – despite having abandoned this kind of movie shortly after the excellent Scary Movie 3. However, to my complete and utter amazement, I found myself mostly enjoying this unhinged parody of Found Footage films almost as much as the iconic spoofs that spear-headed the genre during the 2000s. And with Paramount having recently announced a reboot of the Scary Movie franchise, I think this is the perfect time to revisit the divisive humor of A Haunted House and maybe figure out why this kind of film hasn’t been popular in a long time.
Before we had memes and internet personalities to make fun of movie tropes for free on the internet, parody movies had been entertaining audiences with meta-humor since the very dawn of cinema. And since the genre attracted large audiences without the need for a serious budget, it made sense for studios to encourage parodies of their own productions – which is precisely what happened with Miramax when they commissioned a parody of the Scream franchise, the original Scary Movie.
The unprecedented success of the spoof (especially overseas) led to a series of sequels, spin-offs and rip-offs that came along throughout the 2000s. While some of these were still quite funny (I have a soft spot for 2008’s Superhero Movie), they ended up flooding the market much like the Guitar Hero games that plagued video game stores during that same timeframe.
You could really confuse someone by editing this scene into Paranormal Activity.
Of course, that didn’t stop Tiddes and Marlon Wayans from wanting to make another spoof meant to lampoon a sub-genre that had been mostly overlooked by the Scary Movie series – namely the second wave of Found Footage films inspired by Paranormal Activity. Wayans actually had an easier time than usual funding the picture due to the project’s Found Footage presentation, with the format allowing for a lower budget without compromising box office appeal.
In the finished film, we’re presented with supposedly real footage recovered from the home of Malcom Johnson (Wayans). The recordings themselves depict a series of unexplainable events that begin to plague his home when Kisha Davis (Essence Atkins) decides to move in, with the couple slowly realizing that the difficulties of a shared life are no match for demonic shenanigans.
In practice, this means that viewers are subjected to a series of familiar scares subverted by wacky hijinks, with the flick featuring everything from a humorous recreation of the iconic fan-camera from Paranormal Activity 3 to bizarre dance numbers replacing Katy’s late-night trances from Oren Peli’s original movie.
Your enjoyment of these antics will obviously depend on how accepting you are of Wayans’ patented brand of crass comedy. From advanced potty humor to some exaggerated racial commentary – including a clever moment where Malcom actually attempts to move out of the titular haunted house because he’s not white enough to deal with the haunting – it’s not all that surprising that the flick wound up with a 10% rating on Rotten Tomatoes despite making a killing at the box office.
However, while this isn’t my preferred kind of humor, I think the inherent limitations of Found Footage ended up curtailing the usual excesses present in this kind of parody, with the filmmakers being forced to focus on character-based comedy and a smaller scale story. This is why I mostly appreciate the love-hate rapport between Kisha and Malcom even if it wouldn’t translate to a healthy relationship in real life.
Of course, the jokes themselves can also be pretty entertaining on their own, with cartoony gags like the ghost getting high with the protagonists (complete with smoke-filled invisible lungs) and a series of silly The Exorcist homages towards the end of the movie. The major issue here is that these legitimately funny and genre-specific jokes are often accompanied by repetitive attempts at low-brow humor that you could find in any other cheap comedy.
Not a good idea.
Not only are some of these painfully drawn out “jokes” incredibly unfunny, but they can also be remarkably offensive in some cases. There are some pretty insensitive allusions to sexual assault here, as well as a collection of secondary characters defined by negative racial stereotypes (even though I chuckled heartily when the Latina maid was revealed to have been faking her poor English the entire time).
Cinephiles often claim that increasingly sloppy writing led to audiences giving up on spoof movies, but the fact is that many of the more beloved examples of the genre contain some of the same issues as later films like A Haunted House – it’s just that we as an audience have (mostly) grown up and are now demanding more from our comedy. However, this isn’t the case everywhere, as – much like the Elves from Lord of the Rings – spoof movies never really died, they simply diminished.
A Haunted House made so much money that they immediately started working on a second one that released the following year (to even worse reviews), and the same team would later collaborate once again on yet another spoof, 50 Shades of Black. This kind of film clearly still exists and still makes a lot of money (especially here in Brazil), they just don’t have the same cultural impact that they used to in a pre-social-media-humor world.
At the end of the day, A Haunted House is no comedic masterpiece, failing to live up to the laugh-out-loud thrills of films like Scary Movie 3, but it’s also not the trainwreck that most critics made it out to be back in 2013. Comedy is extremely subjective, and while the raunchy humor behind this flick definitely isn’t for everyone, I still think that this satirical romp is mostly harmless fun that might entertain Found Footage fans that don’t take themselves too seriously.
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