Rob Zombie to Fuck up The Blob Next
I didn’t think it was possible that Rob Zombie’s Halloween X II could be any worse than Rob Zombie’s Halloween IX I*, and yet there I was, sitting in the theater, wishing that someone had slipped cyanide into my slushie. That someone could (allegedly) so revere John Carpenter’s original classic and yet (seemingly) have no understanding whatsoever of what made that movie so fucking great is a kind of a head-scratcher to me; I mean, Zombie’s Halloween movies are really just unwatchable drek. The nicest thing I can think to say about Zombie’s film is that it moves at twenty-four frames per second, giving the illusion of motion. That’s about it.
Now Zombie has set his sights remaking on another horror classic: The Blob.
Look: I’m actually not opposed to someone remaking The Blob. The original 1958 film launched the career of Steve McQueen and is still a lot of fun to watch, but is in no way, shape, or form scary – it’s just way too campy for modern audiences. Furthermore, the film was already remade once, in 1988, in a version that was written by Frank Darabont – the dude who would go on to make The Shawshank Redemption. That version of The Blob, kind of surprisingly, remains the epitome of everything a remake should aspire to be: it maintains the basic concept and a few key scenes from the original, but otherwise goes off more or less in its own direction. It is also still, twenty-years later, pretty scary. Director Chuck Russell (who’s no Rob Zombie, but still) made the decision that this blob should be able to move crazy fast, and he had the cojones to kill a little kid (in a very violent and unpleasant manner), which is a big no-no in Hollywood-funded horror flicks. Again, the ’88 Blob is no masterpiece or anything, but it is a really fun movie.
So, of course, right off the bat, Zombie is displaying no understanding whatsoever of what made those movies work. From Variety:
“My intention is not to have a big red blobby thing — that’s the first thing I want to change,” Zombie said. “That gigantic Jello-looking thing might have been scary to audiences in the 1950s, but people would laugh now.”
So Zombie is making a movie called The Blob that won’t have a blob? What the fuck is it going to have then? And why even call it The Blob? That wasn’t the first movie to be about an alien that destroys a town and it won’t be the last, so are you just trading in on name recognition in hopes of making a quick buck? And if that’s the case, wouldn’t it better to just, y’know, jump off a fucking cliff onto some sharp rocks already?
The simplicity of The Blob is a big part of why both movies were successful. Yes, a slow-moving jelly thing is not as scary as it was in ’58, but like I said, someone already figured out a way to fix that problem. I cannot imagine that Zombie has a better idea for how to improve the concept.
No word yet on a release date for Rob Zombie’s Not The Blob, but based on Zombie’s other directorial efforts, there are two things we know for sure about this movie already:
- The characters are going to be white trash.
- One of those white trash characters will be played by Sherri Moon Zombie.
Here’s the trailer for the ’58 The Blob…
…and a collection of some of the gorier kills from the ’88 The Blob:
-AR
*Side-note: Zombie’s Halloween II was actually out-grossed this weekend by The Final Destination, which is in 3-D. The Weinstein Company – a.k.a. the people who funded Halloween II – have now announced that Halloween III will be in 3-D. Is Zombie coming back? How will his awfulness translate to three dimensions? Stay tuned to find out…
