Sgathaich: The Blob

While in most minds a B movie would be a cheap rubber monster, a cheesy plot and just a bunch of silliness. Sometimes they would produce something genuinely good, something different. Something I could easily have reviewed on Halloween. So let’s look into how a simple premise for a monster can make some horrifying results… in the 50s (they made a remake in the 80s… as you can imagine it has nightmarish practical special effects)

Released in 1958 The Blob is a cult classic horror movie in colour (important as a lot of similar movies were black and white) The premise of the monster is simple yet effective and well realized. An alien blob that consumes living beings and becomes larger as it does so.

Starring the legendary Steven McQueen the film is set in a small rural town in Pennsylvania. He’s a teen and while he and his girlfriend Jane Martin played by Aneta Corsaut are not as much as the rabble rousing other teens who do races, they still get stuck with the stigma. They see a meteor crash and while going to look at it find an old man who had poked it with a stick now got something stuck on his arm. He’s begging them to take him to a doctor.

What follows is a night of horror as the strange Being grows larger with each kill making it more dangerous and deadly. Made worse, the only people that know it exists are distrusted by the police despite begging them to believe them (to the point some old lady with no evidence is treated as a reliable witness over them).

The film leads up to some truly famous scenes that are well remembered (and often reenacted in the very town it’s set in) to this day.  The monster as said is not some man in a suit but yeah a blob which helps it stand out from other 50s B movie creatures. While it’s never truly shown what happens when the Blob eats someone it’s left to our imagination the horrific experience (though the 80s movie covered that in horrifying detail, I dare not look as I keep having difficulty sleeping when I do, even when I went to look in the library a few years back during the middle of the day. Few seconds in and I NOPED)

The film is now over 50 years old so it’s very easy to find if you go looking, most likely helped by its cult classic nature.

Rating: spear spear spear spear spear

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