The recently deceased Chuck Russell is a filmmaker who never reached the heights of fame that his talent warranted; though his work as a director retains an evergreen luster that has stood the test of time through eternally re-watchable films like “A Nightmare on Elm Street: Dream Warriors” (1987), “The Mask” (1994), and most notably “The Blob” (1988) A widely regarded writer and director whose collaborations with Frank Darabont, the cantankerous if prolific Writer/Director of “The Shawshank Redemption” (1994) and “The Mist” (2007), Russell’s finest work just so happened to bring him to Louisiana, not for it’s unique charms and culture but for it’s universal ones.
Meeting as young, ambitious writers on the Linda Blair-starring slasher “Hell Night” (1981), Russell and Darabont’s sensibilities complemented each other from the fore; with Darabont’s penchant for creating instantly relatable characters folding neatly with Russell’s giddy aptitude for sending those characters to their untimely deaths in increasingly inventive and emotionally affecting ways; a rarity in the midst of the often senseless “blood and breasts” barrage of the 80’s slasher boom. What set Russel and Darabont apart from their schlockier brethren is an intuitive understanding that the most horrific monstrosity of all is seeing ourselves on screen. There’s a reason why “Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors” is often heralded as one of, if not the finest entry in the legendary film series; that unique combination of wit, charm, and empathy that finds audiences not so much cheering for the killer to dissect hapless teens as they are mourning the cruel deaths of characters that they have come to care for and see themselves reflected within. By taking direct inspiration from Alfred Hitchcock, Stephen King, and the Cold War paranoia that Russell and Darabont grew up within, “The Blob” remake became something much more than a cheap modernization or a cash grab glomming onto nostalgia like the titular beast itself. Instead, it grew organically into a rarity of the era, a gore fest with heart and a sterling example of what the genre can be when allowed to be bold, daring, and mean; a movie that is thrilling, goopy, and poignant, sending old-time values on a collision course with the modern-day meat grinder of a world at perpetual war.
The original “The Blob” (1958) is a B-movie classic starring a young Steve McQueen as a clean-cut boy trying to stop his town from being overrun by a vibrantly pink, oblong, sludge-like creature that is, as pronounced in big bold letters on its poster, “INDESCRIBABLE…INDESTRUCTIBLE! NOTHING CAN STOP IT!”. The film is silly, as are the best examples of that particular genre, most remembered for the novelty song “The Blob” written by Burt Bacharach and Mack David, which became a nationwide hit in 1958 and an incredible sequence where the titular “Blob” rips it’s way through a movie theater crowd before expelling itself through the marquee and onto the streets of a quiet small town. There is even a yearly “Blobfest” at the Colonial Theater in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania, where audience members are given the chance to sprint from the theater, screeching and screaming as if a massive glob of sentient ooze were hot on their heels. It’s kitschy and fun, the fodder of the drive-in movie culture that fetishizes classic hot rods parked side by side in the Summer heat before an outdoor screen where high school romances were consummated and the worlds of fantasy were made real.
Though the film may be set in a small town in Colorado, one plagued by an incessant heat that has ruined their tourist trade, its true location is that of Abbeville, Louisiana; a quaint little slice of Americana South of Lafayette. That amber glow of the past that overwhelms the original film has no place in Russell’s “The Blob”, though its setting, at least initially, retains the outward charms and stereotypes of yesteryear. There’s the quarterback (Donovan Leitch ) and the cheerleader (Shawnee Smith), going out on their first date. There’s the motorcycle-riding hooligan (Kevin Dillon) who will soon turn eighteen and face the full brunt of the justice system for his petty crimes. There’s a kindly sheriff (Darabont favorite Jeffrey DeMunn) who has a crush on a soft-hearted diner owner (Candy Clark), a deputy with an itchy trigger finger (Paul McCrane of “Robocop” fame), and a kooky old man who lives in the woods and collects cans (Billy Beck). These archetypes could be found in dozens of movies made throughout the 1950s and 1960s, when the age of the atom wrought forth movie monsters of nuclear creation like “THEM!” (Giant ants), “Beginning of the End” (Giant grasshoppers), or “Attack of the 50 Foot Woman” (which seems to be self-explanatory). It’s easy to see why Russell chose Abbeville as his modern-day Mayberry, with its Main Street and single-screen movie house. But where filmmakers of an earlier era found American idealism in the soda and barber shops of a whitewashed time, Russell found something darker, more insidious, and threatening. Stephen King’s “The Stand” is a particular reference point, as death surrounds and threatens to invade the quaint community. While the opening credits unfurl, we see it as little more than a ghost town, populated by roving tomcats and leaves flitting across unpopulated lawns. You’d be forgiven for believing this to be a flash-forward to the aftereffects of The Blob’s rampage, a snapshot of what’s to come. This imagery would be squarely at home in an educational film about the dangers of atomic armament, of life in a post-nuclear wasteland devoid of humanity. We settle on a cemetery, wide and rolling, that seems to place a particularly blunt period on the end of Russell’s opening statement. THIS is where we will be, if we are not there already. But Russell isn’t done quite yet as we pan left, over the grave stones, to the stands of a football stadium; bleachers filled to bursting as the entire town has come out to see the big game. While death lurks just beyond their field of view, they have come here for the oldest American pastime; clothed in the comforts of convention, where football players date cheerleaders, and everyone swarms the local diner after a victory. They have no idea what is coming for them. But Russell does, and immediately we are locked in for the ride.
Whereas the original “The Blob” was constrained by the censors of its time, leaving the destruction of its gelatinous pink monster from space mostly to the imagination, Russell faces no such guardrails and grants his effects wizards free range to run wild. This Blob is a cancer, a slowly creeping, infectious acid bath that disintegrates, contorts, and brutalizes anyone in its path; mouths are ripped open from chin to forehead, eyeballs burst from sockets, a man is even forcibly yanked face-first into a sink drain; blood-soaked tennis shoes and all. It’s a modern horror for a more vicious time, with Tony Gardner carrying on the tradition laid out by Rob Bottin on John Carpenter’s “The Thing” (1982), itself a modern retelling of a classic monster flick. There is no sympathy or humanity in this candy colored devil; all it knows to do is to feed, to grow, to expand its breadth until every single thing is subsumed into itself; an assimilation monstrosity that, if left unchecked, will overtake the known world. While the original “The Blob” could be read as an overt representation of the “Red Menace” of Communism during the height of the Cold War, Russell’s creation is 100% American-made. Late in the film, we learn that the creature is not the alien life form we have been made to believe but is a mutated bio-weapon created by our own United States government, the next rung in an arms race that stretches back to the Manhattan Project. Just as the men perpetuating the nuclear tests in the Nevada desert cared little for the aftereffects foisted upon the locals whose only crime was living in a place desolate enough to decimate, the people of this small town are overtly expendable, cobblestones on the road to military dominance. Russell and Darabont’s ultimate brilliance is in presenting the truth of our jingoistic world through the shock and awe of a monster movie; unleashing a bubble gum slop creature that represents government interests and the slow creep of capitalism that will always consume and digest the little people caught in its sluggish, inexhaustible path of destruction and death. Though the Cold War is long over, these threats don’t die so much as they transmogrify and modernize. Consider the ICE troops invading towns across this country, snatching away citizens and neighbors to feed an ever-escalating propaganda war of bile, hatred, and lies. Check out Meta’s insidious data center that has recently infected the rural landscape of Northeast Louisiana; speaking of inexhaustibly hungry parasites that suck away the lives of regular people for the “greater good”. What Russell pinpoints, deftly and with the panache of a great filmmaker, is that believing in the infallibility of authority figures is harbinger of our own downfall and that the hungriest monsters do not come from the stars but from boardrooms, crafted by greedy men for whom we are little more than chattel; chewing up and spitting out the old, the young, the conservative, and the liberal alike. We all bleed red and go down smooth. Still, instead of languishing in despair, “The Blob” also offers us hope in each other, in community, in the staring down of fascistic forces and trusting that the only way to take care of each other is to see the opaque untruths of the powerful for what they are and reclaim the power each of us has to be stronger together than apart. As the film unfurls, Russell shows characters not as archetypes but as people who care, who mourn, who dare stand against the rise of masked men with guns telling them that their deaths are unimportant. It’s a guidebook toward our liberation, as much as it is an allegory of our desolation; a cry for humanity with impeccable practical effects. In truth, the finest kind.
“The Blob” (1988) may not be the most authentically Louisiana movie ever made, but it is certainly an American one; as pertinent today as it was when it was made. Russell’s cross-pollination of empathy and cynicism makes for a potent cocktail of late 80’s moviemaking, leaving behind a film whose legacy has been growing for forty years and shows no signs of slowing anytime soon.
RIP Chuck Russell & Beware of The Blob.
You’ll be glad you did.
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