- Directed by Larry Hagman
- Written by Jack Woods, Anthony Harris, Richard Clair
- Stars Robert Walker Jr, Gwynne Gilford, Richard Stahl
- Run Time: 1 Hour, 27 Minutes
- Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcTG5C6x_jU
Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone
Apparently after the first movie they randomly dumped it in the arctic without marking the spot or telling anyone about it. So it’s back again. The movie’s a little dated. It’s more gruesome than the first movie, but it’s also a lot funnier too with quite a bit of dark humor. Overall a worthy sequel.
Synopsis
Credits roll over cute kittens playing in the grass.
We cut to a couple out camping… in their garage. His wife Mariane finds a Thermos in their freezer that says “Specimen, keep frozen.” She says the freezer is for food that they eat. Chester’s just fresh back from the arctic; it’s something his crew’s bulldozer found, and he wants to take it to the lab sometime. They leave the canister out on the counter and go off to do their own things. Mariane feeds the little cat in the kitchen. The baby blob oozes out of the canister and suddenly, the kitten is gone. Mariane goes outside looking for the cat, but the blob finds her instead.
Lisa, Leslie, and a group of girls plan a party; can they get Bobby to come? We watch a group of scouts getting a nature lesson from their scoutmaster, and they run into Lisa on the road. Chester is watching the original “The Blob” on TV. He gets up to tune the TV, and when he sits down, the blob has taken his chair, which goes badly for him. Lisa comes over to Chester’s house to pick up a gift and she sees him mostly covered in blob goo, but not quite dead yet. She screams and makes a run for it.
Lisa drives down the road to get Bobby, and the two go back to Chester’s house. The scoutmaster gets annoyed with his kids playing with annoying clacky-ball toys. Bobby and Lisa don’t find anything at the now-deserted Chester’s house. When they come out of the house, the sheriff is there because she was driving like a maniac.
Meanwhile, Randy, a guy who can’t sing, is wailing with his guitar in a storm drain. He and his girlfriend are super high. They’re busted by a couple of cops. One of them gets called away, but the blob eats the one who remains.
A hairdresser wants to charge a hippie $400 for a haircut. He’s a snarky, smartass hairdresser who insults his customer throughout the process. Neither of them see the blob coming up through the drain. The screaming ensues from both of them.
The police release Lisa and Bobby, but she’s really insistent about the thing she saw. The police didn’t find anything. One of the deputies arrests a naked man running down the street; the blob ate the man’s dog. Lisa and Bobby go home, forgetting that this is Bobby’s surprise party. She gets even more hysterical, but they all think she’s on drugs and ignore her carrying on.
The police start noticing a lot of missing persons calls this evening. Edward Fazio has trouble unloading his beer cans and swears vengeance against Bobby. Three hobos complain about hating hippies and get drunk. They hear something outside and argue about who’s gonna go outside and look to see what it is. That goes badly for all three of them.
Lisa notices the scout troop’s fire up on the hill; we see a bunch of empty sleeping bags. The blob oozes down and covers Bobby and Lisa’s entire truck. In the struggle, they kick their air conditioner up to high, but they don’t put it together when the blob backs off. It goes and eats a bunch of horses instead, so they get away. They pick up Leslie and go to the bowling office. Leslie sees that the blob has halfway eaten Joe the gorilla-suited party guest, and it ends up eating her as well.
Lisa and Bobby get to the bowling alley. They call for the sheriff, but end up getting thrown out. Turns out, the manager of the bowling alley is Edward Fazio, who hates them both. The blob eats a couple of bowling alley repairmen and the screaming starts, along with a stampede.
The phones start ringing off the hook at the sheriff’s office. Meanwhile, the blob is pigging out at the bowling office. Fazio believes Bobby and Lisa now, and he goes to hide with them. They get trapped in the ice skating ring that’s next to the bowling alley.
Bobby spills some ice on the blob and it retreats. They remember that they had the air conditioner on in the truck when it retreated there too. They think that if they turn on the ice skating rink, it’ll freeze the creature. Outside, the sheriff tells the deputy to get a bunch of gasoline, and they’ll burn the place down.
Bobby has to swing across over the blob on a rope to get to the control box for the ice rink. He hits the switch, and the blob freezes. The sheriff is just about to light the fire outside when Bobby, Lisa, and Fazio run out and tell him not to burn the building.
The TV news crew comes in to interview the sheriff, and they bring bright hot lights with them…
Commentary
This is the only film Larry Hagman directed.
Many characters are playing with Kernockers, those annoying knocker-balls; those must have been the current fad when this was filmed.
It often seemed like a series of little segments that have been tacked together, but at least it looks like the actors mostly had fun making this. There are lots of familiar faces from 70s and 80s shows here, and it’s almost as much comedy as it is horror.
It’s pretty dated, after all it was fifty years ago, but it’s not so bad if you watch it with horror-comedy in mind and don’t take it too seriously.