The Schube: It’s not quite October (the month also known as “mecca” for any horror fan worth their salt), but we figure we’ll bide our time until Halloween with a few old-school spooktacular reviews.

Let’s get right into it, kiddos: What we have here is quite the hamfisted cluster of a movie that still admirably tries hard to push its way into a horror fan’s heart.

You can expect some terrific kills and great close-up special effects: My personal faves are the dude who tries to unclog an industrial kitchen sink and ends up getting sucked through the drain by the Blob. Another great moment is when a guy tries to hit the Blob with a flamethrower, and the Blob seals up the end of the weapon so it backfires and blows homeboy up.

It’s when the Blob is shown from a distance that this flick becomes a campy, B-movie laughfest that I’m not sure was intended. It’s so odd to have a movie sometimes take itself so seriously — and actually work, in those brief instances — and then moments later fall rump over elbows into camp when the Blob is so obviously either superimposed, or attacking what is laughably a Tonka truck in a miniaturized plastic model town square, or climbing the walls of a building in stop-motion animation that is Ray Harryhausen bad.

The other big problem is the whiteness of everything. It’s the same thing we see in so many other B-grade horror movies of the 80s: FADE IN on a town we’ll call Pleasantville, or Parkerville, or Pinkerton, or whatever but it always seems to start with a P and has three syllables. Have you noticed this? All of the characters are white, and I mean Whitey McWhite, and all of the families are happy and nobody’s divorced except that one mean drunk who snarls a lot and drinks heavily, and who is the second or third to die (the first always being the drunk hobo who wanders the outskirts of the woods and the junkyards collecting tin cans).

It’s the same clean and happy town that is 99.99 percent white and I’m including the Blob of course but also any number of 1980s movies like Critters, the Gate, Fright Night, Killer Klowns from Outer Space, the list goes on.

The only token black guy is either a husky football player who wears his jersey 24/7 and has a strikingly nerdy white name like Clarence, or he’s a Mechanic (that’s probably his name in the script, I assure you) who keeps to himself until he has to one day step up to fight the baddie, only to die a death that is supposed to leave us slightly saddened for a moment before we cut to what the Whitey McWhites are up to.

Also a problem in this film is that the main female goodie, Shawnee Smith — who later went on to do some solid work — constantly wears an odd expression kind of like she just caught a whiff of a really nasty beer/pizza-infused fart. So be prepared to watch her fumble about with that stinkface for an hour and 35 minutes. The dialogue certainly didn’t do her any favors, either. Sample line: “Suck on this, slimeball!” See, in ’88, you needed a heavy hitter like Linnea Quigley to pull that off. Otherwise, you need a rewrite guy on set, even if that turns out to be the dude stocking the craft truck.

Kevin Dillon rocks Hollywood's first and last white afro-mullet.

The guy who becomes the hero dude is Kevin Dillon, who later ended up looking like a normal bloke as he grew out of what he looks like in this movie. In ’88, he looked like a cross between Matt Dillon and the kid from the movie Mask. Here we find him playing the role of tough outsider biker guy, and he struts around like he’s trying to pinch his butt cheeks together. He does tough guy biker things like, instead of sitting down in a chair, he approaches the chair and swings his leg over the back of it as he takes his seat. Because sitting down normal is for squares or something.

The Blob itself is pretty cool looking 60 to 70 percent of the time. It’s corrosive, so it melts people’s faces and also gets inside them and makes them implode, which is pretty fun. The Blob gets into a movie theatre and wreaks some havoc, and there’s a money shot where it’s climbing in front of the projector and you can see the projector lighting up the inside of the Blob. But then we get some kind of strobe light effect thrown into the mix for about 2 minutes, to the point where you have to look away or risk going into a seizure and later having to explain to your friends you were watching this movie when it happened.

Finally, kudos to the Whitey McWhites for finally realizing after 93 minutes that you can’t shoot the Blob and kill it. Kudos to them for suddenly finding a giant snowmaker truck and then driving it into the Blob, and then screwing that up and having to get out and shoot the truck so that it explodes and makes the snow come out and freeze the Blob and snow all over the town of Parkerville/Pinkerton/Pansyville.

- Schube out.