1972 Directed by Larry Hagman
A technician brings a frozen specimen of the original Blob back from the North Pole. When his wife accidentally defrosts the thing, it terrorizes the populace-- the local hippies, cops, drunks and bowlers must all face the Blob!
Son of Blob, Cuidado con la masa, The Blob 2 - Beware! The Blob, Blob. Masa mortal, Attention au Blob !, 블롭의 아들, 小心幽浮魔點
USA
USA
This is the only film Larry Hagman directed, and I’m going to say that’s a good thing. Known primarily for playing JR on Dallas (when reissued, this film had the tagline ‘The Film that JR Shot’), here Hagman shows no affinity for directing. None at all.
But is this film wonderful?
Completely.
This is the kind of D-Grade almost-film that I have a bizarre soft spot for (recording a podcast about Video Nasties - NastyPALs, find it on iTunes, Spotify and Soundcloud - will do that to you). This film doesn’t barely hang together, it shows no interest in even trying to hang together. The idea of cohering is anathema to it. This is the kind of counter cultural anti-narrative…
Beware! of this horrid film!
I want to blame its awfulness on a low budget but clearly it's a result of hardcore drug use!
If this had been re-enacted with stick figures it would have been a tremendous improvement!
Music by Mort Garson. I found this to be on the whole enjoyable in spite of violating a sacred and unspoken rule: never kill the best character first!
Presumably this was supposed to be a comedy punctuated with elements of horror. But it's not funny, nor horrific. It's one of those loosely made movies from the 70's where everything seems made up as they went along. In fact, much of the dialogue was clearly ad-libbed. (Sample line: "You broke my 49 cent thing! I really liked that thing.")
Some of the blob effects are fun, but on average they actually look worse than the 1958 version. The climax had what I think were meant to be forced perspective tricks, but were really just pieces of the blob placed right in front of the camera, slightly out of focus.
There is a half-assed attempt at a storyline with a…
A sequel made 14 years after the original. This one is pretty widely considered the worst of the three Blob flicks. It carries a Comedy genre tag where the others didn't, and many of the characters are over-the-top zany. We also get many scenes that are filled with absolute nonsense - the zany characters going about their absurd ways in conversations that both make little sense and have no bearing on the film. I did find some entertainment value here, but it was with the realization that this was a comedy and not the horror film that the title implies.
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Not for everyone, it appears, but I love the tone of this movie so much defined as it is largely by the episodic comedic bits that feel 90% improvised but not in the lazy contemporary way by Judd Apatow's friends but by stoned 70s comedians who appear to be having a blast (the hair stylist and the hippie sequence is pure 70s variety TV sketch). The cheapness and looseness becomes a feature, not a bug.
Was genuinely so excited to check Beware! The Blob after how much I found myself loving the original.
Technical advancements help this sequel shine even more than the original. The innovative techniques to show the Blob’s movements and reign of terror are so thrilling. Not really a scary watch but GOD is it a good time from start to finish.
The universe of the Blob is an odd one though. The sequel implies the actions of the original to be real life events but then a character is killed while watching the original film on TV. A fascinating disregard for establishing what is and is not cannon but done in a cheeky enough way that its fun enough to ignore as a true detriment.
I LOVE THE BLOB!!!! It may even be my favorite monster movie franchise.
This movie is special. And not just because it was directed by J.R. from DALLAS. It manages to be a horror-comedy without resorting to exaggerated camp or self-reference. It really is just a comedy movie that also has a killer blob in it. Or maybe it's a killer blob movie that has a comedy in it? Either way, hippies are the butt of many jokes, the blob looks great, and there's a guy in an ape suit, so I'm walking away a satisfied customer every time. Is any other horror franchise as consistently good as THE BLOB, BEWARE! THE BLOB and the 80s remake of THE BLOB?
Okay, I’d been warned that this was not a good movie. But, hey, it’s on the Criterion Channel! How bad can it be?
Well ...
I can honestly say that I have just watched the worst theatrically released movie I have ever seen. I have seen Monster Kid movies shot in the 1960’s at home with a silent 8mm camera that were better than this. I’m not exaggerating.
To detail the faults would create the longest review I’ve ever written for Letterboxd, and I’m not going to do that. Let me just go with the Top Four highlights:
* Larry Hagman must have been vying for the title of Worst Director of…
1972 In Review - June
#9
A technician brings a frozen specimen of the original Blob back from the North Pole. When his wife accidentally defrosts the thing, it terrorizes the populace, including the local hippies, kittens and bowlers.
Larry Hagman is an actor famous for his portrayal of JR Ewing in Dallas, but did you know he directed a film. Yes it was this film, a film so bad that he never directed a film ever again. The original 1958 movie "The Blob" is well known and admired to this very day. However, this sequel is all but unknown 50 years after it was first released, and it does not take long upon watching it to determine why. Much…
