Film / The Blob (1988)

Terror has no shape.

"Scream now, while there's still room to breathe."

— Tagline

The Blob is a 1988 Sci-Fi Horror film directed by Chuck Russell, who co-wrote the screenplay with Frank Darabont. It is a remake of the 1958 film.

A meteorite crashes into the forest outside the small mountain town of Arborville, California. A blob of slime from the crater quickly develops a taste for human flesh and starts to slither and hunt through the otherwise quiet town. It is up to three local teens, jock Paul (Donovan Leitch), cheerleader Meg (Shawnee Smith), and bad boy Brian (Kevin Dillon), to stop it.

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This film provides examples of:

• '80s Hair: Brian sports an extravagant mullet in addition to a single stud earring. Yes, this is the 1980s.
• Absurdly Spacious Sewer: It's wide enough for a bike to go through. The sewers being so absurdly spacious is actually explained in an easy-to-miss bit of dialogue. The "sewers" are actually an aqueduct system built to prevent flooding from the mountains.
• Actionized Adaptation: This time, the climactic finale with The Blob is far more action-packed, featuring gunfire and explosions.
• Adaptational Backstory Change: Ever so slightly, facilitating a minor plot twist not present in the original. Instead of being an alien life-form which arrived via a meteor, the Blob is a biological weapon created by the American military during the Cold War which was ejected into space in a satellite, mutated in the depths of space, and crashed back down to Earth.
• Adaptational Badass:
  • The Blob itself. Not only is it much faster and more intelligent than before, it's also much tougher. While in the original film, the Blob was completely immobilized by fire extinguishers alone, here they only succeed in temporarily warding it off, and it takes an explosion of liquid nitrogen to finally put it down.
  • Meg and Brian, especially the former, are far more active than Jane or Steve from the original film. Meg is an outright horror Action Girl by the film's end, and Brian kicks the asses of some of the government hazmat suit agents, and to top it off, they're the ones who singlehandedly stop the Blob's rampage.
• Adaptational Intelligence: The advanced creature effects in this version allow the Blob to use more complex tactics in the way it hunts. It's now apparently aware that it must take its victims by surprise. We frequently see it hide from and ambush its prey rather than mindlessly ooze toward its next victim. It also actively grabs at its prey with extendable pseudopods rather than just passively rolling over them. It even seems to understand firearms, purposely sabotaging a flamethrower at one point.
• Amputation Stops Spread: Subverted. The homeless man suddenly shows up wielding an axe for a Jump Scare, but it turns out that he's trying to hack his lower arm off because the micro-blob that fell from space has started consuming it. Before he can finish, the blob clutches to the limb's remainder to continue eating him.
• Antagonist Title: The eponymous Blob is of course the monster that tries to devour everyone.
• Anti-Hero: Flagg is a delinquent, but helps save the day in the end.
• Anyone Can Die: The reason the film uses a Decoy Protagonist is to make the audience feel that anyone can die. It works.
• Armor Is Useless: All the military personnel are wearing thick white NBC suits, which turn out to be completely useless against the Blob, probably because they didn't expect it to have evolved into a macroscopic predator that secretes instant-death acid.
• Artistic License – Biology: How does the Blob know how to find prey, actively hunt, and grab people if it seemingly doesn't have distinct tissues, organs or sensory receptors? It's never explained, but otherwise the Blob wouldn't be a threat. The novelization's passages written in the blob's perspective mention that it can smell blood somehow.
• Asshole Victim: A few, especially Dr. Meddows. Special mention goes to the guy who won't stop talking in the theatre and is rude towards Kevin when he asks him to be quiet and quit ruining the movie.
• Badass Driver: Brian is first introduced trying to jump over the ravine and fails. It works a second time. Later he puts his skills while evading the blob in the sewers.
• Bad Vibrations: After Meddows is sucked into the sewer and killed by the Blob, the rest of his men decide to hell with trying to capture it alive, and open fire with all they got into the manhole. They think they've killed it until the ground around them starts quaking...
  Hargis: What's happening?!
  Brian: I think... you pissed it off.
• Bait-and-Switch: George the cook sticks his arm down the drain but nothing happens to him. The Blob instead rockets out of the sink and goes for George's face and drags him down the sink face-first.
• Battle Couple: During the climax, Meg and Brian work to stop the blob.
• Better to Die than Be Killed: After a failed attempt to blow up the Blob by dropping some bombs down the sewer, Hargis is about to be crushed and consumed by the Blob. He pulls the pins from his grenades just as the Blob falls on him. We see two flashes inside the Blob as the grenades explode. Since Hargis had seen the Blob take victims already, this was the lesser of gruesome fates.
• Big Bad: Dr. Christopher Meddows, who created the Blob and is responsible for its rampage, using it to test its power. Unfortunately, the monster proves too much for even him to handle, and he is devoured before the Blob almost consumes the whole town.
• Bioweapon Beast: The Blob in this version is revealed to be the accidental result of an American military experiment conducted on a space satellite. Although the military scientists responsible didn't expect it, they're very pleased with the result and talk about deploying it against the Soviets. (In the original, it's just an alien who visits Earth to find food.) Unfortunately for them, the Blob is way too dangerous to be controlled.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Dr. Meddows comes across as friendly and helpful at first glance, but we see soon later who he truly is.
• Blob Monster: Like the original, the Blob is an amorphous monster that devours its prey to add them to its own biomass.
• Bloodier and Gorier: Thanks to improved special effects by the time. The deaths were considerably more gruesome, because we see some of the victims dissolve on-screen.
• Body Motifs: The Blob dissolves people to the bone, has the ability to form protrusions like intestines and flexes like a muscle or stomach, all to make it feel like an abstraction of a digestive system.
• Brick Joke:
  • Scott purchases ribbed condoms from the pharmacist, claiming they're for his buddy Paul. When Paul shows up for his date with Meg, it turns out that her father is the pharmacist. He snarls, "Ribbed!" when he recognizes Paul.
  • When Brian goes to the town garage to borrow a wrench to tune up his motorcycle, he strikes up a conversation with Moss the mechanic about how the town's ski resort is failing because it barely snowed last year. Moss assures him that this year will be different. At the end, when the Blob is defeated by detonating some tanks of liquid nitrogen, the town is showered with snow by the explosion. Moss playfully throws a snowball at Brian, telling him "I told you we'd have snow!"
• Bring It Back Alive: Dr. Meddows wants the Blob contained and captured at any cost, because he sees its potential as a weapon of mass destruction. Once he's killed by his own creation, the rest of men disregard his order, although it proves just as hard to kill as it was to try and capture.
• Came from the Sky: How The Blob got to earth. Subverted when it's revealed to have been shot into orbit by human scientists in the first place.
• Cassandra Truth: Meg witnesses Paul getting consumed by the Blob in the hospital, but when she tries to tell the police, her parents, and Brian, they think she's hysterical or strung out. Fortunately (or rather... unfortunately), she's vindicated not too long afterwards.
• Ceiling Corpse: The theater manager walks into the projection room and a yo-yo falls down from above. He looks up, and sees the projectionist stuck to the ceiling, half-dissolved by the Blob before he himself gets snatched up by it.
• Censored Child Death: Subverted when we see Eddie get dragged underwater by the Blob to be eaten. Then the Blob lifts him out of the water just to scare his friends, half-dissolved and all.
• Chekhov's Gun:
  • The snowmaking truck at the mechanic's being repaired for the town's upcoming skiing season. It ends up proving crucial in stopping the Blob's rampage during the climax.
  • Reverend Meeks collects a few pieces of the frozen Blob in a glass jar which is not seen again. Until the last shot reveals that Meeks intends to use it to wipe out humanity.
• Closed Circle: Government scientists have surrounded the town to prevent the Blob from getting out, turn the protagonists back home when they attempt to leave, and have cut off the phone lines to keep any information from leaking out.
• Combat Tentacles: Part of what makes this Blob much more dangerous; it's not only faster in general, but it can shoot out pseudopods to grab prey from afar rather than having to flow over the top of them.
• Crisis Makes Perfect: Near the beginning of the movie, Brian attempts to jump a broken bridge with his motorcycle, but fails. Much later, he's trying to escape from the military personnel after he learns too much, and is chased towards the same bridge by armed soldiers on trucks, ATVs, and helicopter (under the impression he's a possible infectee to a non-existent disease). This time he makes it, but the trucks aren't so lucky.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: Getting killed by the Blob is pretty horrible. You're basically digested alive, and the process isn't quick.
• Darker and Edgier: Oh yes. The deaths are not only more graphic, but come more as a shock, its victims extending to children (and not censored that is) and the supposed jock protagonist.
• Date Rape Averted: Scott gets his date Vicki so drunk that she passes out. Scott starts to unbutton her blouse and fondle her while she's unconscious, but it turns out that she's actually dead, hollowed by the Blob. It kills him next, preventing his date rape by default.
• Death by Adaptation: The Reasonable Authority Figure in this film, one of the main protagonists in the original, is killed fairly early.
• Death of a Child: Meg rescues her child brother, Kevin and his friend, Eddie. Right before they climb out of the sewer, Eddie is pulled underwater screaming. Moments later, he pops out of the water again. Half melted. Still screaming.
• Death from Above: Paul is killed at the hospital when the Blob drops onto him from the ceiling above.
• Decoy Protagonist:
  • Paul Taylor is the likeable jock who has just begun dating the heroine Meg while Brian Flagg is a James Dean-like anti-authority dude with more than a few run-ins with the Man. Then Paul becomes the Blob's second victim, and Flagg takes over the Hero role.
  • Sheriff Geller. The sheriff in the original film was a major supporting player all the way to the end. Anyone who's seen the original prior to this will be in for a bit of a shock to see him devoured by the film's mid-point.
• Disconnected by Death: Paul's phone call is ended abruptly by the Blob dropping on him. As well, the diner owner is chased into a phone booth, which the Blob leisurely envelops. She has time for one phone call - which does no good at all - before the Blob busts in and sucks her out.
• Distinction Without a Difference: When Dr. Meddows and his men find Meg and Brian at the edge of town, he orders them back because the area is under quarantine until they've isolated the alien organism and ensured no one is infected. Brian asks if that makes them all prisoners, but Dr. Meddows says they're all his patients. Brian points out the difference in this case is arbitrary, and it's later shown that neither is the real case: Meddows actually considers the townsfolk to be expendable guinea pigs.
• Dramatic Gun Cock: Subverted. Flagg picks up an M16 that's already cocked to threaten Meddows but the charging handle was not shut. If he had fired, the charging handle would have slammed into his face!
• Dramatic Irony: There are several scenes where the audience sees the Blob lurking nearby or slowly flowing toward its ignorant prey.
• *Drool* Hello: Paul sees a few drops of Hollywood Acid drip onto a desk before realizing that the Blob is right above him.
• Dying Moment of Awesome: Subverted by Hargis, the military commander. When the Blob is about to fall on him, he grins and pulls the pins on two grenades. A few moments later, almost as an afterthought, we see two brief flashes of light inside the Blob, which had no effect whatsoever.
• Dying Town: Downplayed. Apparently, much of the economy of Arborbille is dependent on winter tourism, but not enough snow has fallen in recent years for skiing. It hasn't led to a population drain just yet, but the town is starting to feel it.
• Eaten Alive: The worst part about being caught by the Blob is that it isn't like a conventional predator which will usually kill you before it eats you. Some of its victims are still alive and screaming as they're gruesomely melted into slime.
• The End... Or Is It?: After the Blob is beaten, a piece of the Blob is shown to be in the possession of the now fundamentalist and unhinged town preacher, who declares that he will one day use it to launch the Apocalypse when "the Lord gives me a sign".
• "Eureka!" Moment: When Meg rushes to put out the flames consuming the town pastor with a fire extinguisher, the Blob stretches out its pseudopods to grab at them, and Meg instinctively sprays the extinguisher at the lashing tentacle. To her surprise, it actually wards the Blob off and causes it to howl in pain, leading her to realize it's weak to cold.
• Everyone Has Standards: The military types accompanying Dr. Meddows occasionally object to his cavalier attitude toward the Blob and lack of interest in the lives of the townsfolk and the soldiers themselves. They ultimately turn on him.
• Evil-Detecting Dog: The hobo's dog growls at the Blob when they see it bubbling inside the meteorite crater. When it starts trying to slither out, the dog whines, turns around, and runs away. His owner isn't as smart and becomes the Blob's first victim.
• Extremely Short Timespan: The entire film (with the exception of the very last scene with the reverend) takes place over roughly half a day; from the scene when the Blob crashes to Earth and the end of the movie is only a couple hours at most in-universe.
• Finger in a Barrel: The Blob at one point uses a pseudopod to plug up a soldier's flamethrower, causing the gas tanks to explode and immolate the man to death, as well as badly burning a nearby pastor.
• Five-Second Foreshadowing:
  • The diner owner Fran attempts to call the sheriff's office for help as the Blob oozes over the phone booth, only to be told the sheriff is already at the diner. Fran looks out of the glass to see the sheriff's half-melted body floating inside the Blob just before it seeps in and eats her too.
  • The guy running the film projector at the theatre complains to his manager that it's sweltering in the projector room, but his manager replies that the air condition is going at full blast. The projectionist ducks his head into the air vents to see if something's blocking circulation and, well...
  • Then later, the theatre's manager sees the projectionist's yo-yo drop from the ceiling, sees the projectionist is being dissolved ON THE CEILING, and has just enough time to scream before he's eaten too.
  • As Meg is leading her brother and his friend through the sewers, they have to wade between two rats sitting on two pieces of floating garbage. She tells them to watch out for the rat, only for her brother to question "what rat?", and it cuts back to the piece of garbage with no rat on it anymore. She looks at the other rat just in time to see it get pulled under by the Blob, which had been following them underneath the water's surface.
• Fold-Spindle Mutilation:
  • Briggs is yanked backwards between the shelves of a bookcase by the Blob, with enough force to bend him in half.
  • A kitchen worker's partially-dissolved body is hauled down a sink's drainhole.
• Foreshadowing:
  • After a funny case of Accidental Pervert thanks to his friend Scott, Paul jokingly vows, "Scott Jeske is gonna die." A few scenes later....
  • Relatively early in the film and shortly after the Blob begins eating people, it's noted how the phone lines are down. It turns out the military personnel have deliberately severed phone lines to prevent information about the Blob from leaking out.
• Ghost Town: Subverted in the opening scenes, which show the small town's streets empty and apparently deserted ... because everyone's at the high school football game.
• Giving Them the Strip: Kevin gets his jacket caught in a door with the Blob on the other side. Meg struggles with the jacket's stuck zipper until she can get him out of it.
• Gorn: Oh yes. Being digested by a transparent monster that is all stomach leaves nothing to the imagination. Ironically, the goriest deaths happen early on, when the Blob is at its smallest, or to people that simply contact its acidic slime trail. One theater patron looks okay, until the protagonist lifts her off the floor - to find half her head melted into it.
• Government Conspiracy: In this film this is the source of the Blob.
• Hazmat Suit: The military task force that arrives to town wears white, spacesuit-style NBC suits with faceplate lights that let everyone clearly see the user's face.
• Heel–Face Turn:
  • After Dr. Meddows' death, the other soldiers, several of whom were already on the fence about sacrificing the entire town to capture the Blob, quickly change their plan to try and destroy it and save the town instead.
  • Deputy Briggs is equivalent to Sgt. Bert in the original. He's a hardass who insists that Brian is behind the recent disturbances, but when the government agents pull weapons on Brian, he defends him and listens to reason. He then helps the townsfolk barricade themselves in the town hall.
• Hockey Mask and Chainsaw: Garden Tool Massacre, the movie showing at the cinema, is a classic slasher example of these. When an expendable teen spots the killer brandishing a hedge trimmer at him while wearing a hockey mask, he comments, "It's not hockey season..."
• Hoist by His Own Petard: Dr. Meddows, the Big Bad of the film responsible for creating the Blob, is eaten by his own experiment.
• Hollywood Acid: The Blob's body secretes digestive enzymes able to completely dissolve any organic matter in seconds, leaving no bodies behind. A drop of its slime falls on a wooden table and almost instantly eats a smoking hole through it (in reality, they did in fact use real acid for the scene, but the table was a piece of styrofoam painted to look like wood). For perspective, the nastiest acids in existence such as hydrofluoric acid or piranha solution would take at least hours to dissolve through human flesh, and even longer to get through the bone.
• Immune to Bullets: The Blob is immune to this and pretty much any other physical weaponry.
• Jerk Jock: Scott Jeske, who progresses from lying to Reverend Meeker and a pharmacist that the condoms he's buying are actually for his buddy Paul (making Paul have a really, really awful first meeting with the pharmacist, who is Meg's father, when he goes to pick her up) to getting his date drunk so he can date rape her. It's almost a Karmic Death when the Blob devours him.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Brian is rough around the edges presumably due to a neglectful upbringing but he is brave, resourceful, and ultimately does the right thing.
• Just Think of the Potential!: Dr. Meddows wants to capture the Blob alive and prohibits his men from shooting it because of its potential as a weapon of mass destruction. His men quickly disregard his order in favor of self-preservation, but their weapons aren't of much use against the Blob either way.
• Karmic Death: Dr Meddows, who is snatched and devoured right after ordering his squad to execute Flagg.
• Kids Shouldn't Watch Horror Films: Meg's younger brother, Kevin, and his friend Eddie, sneak into a Slasher Movie behind his mother's back. Of course, the issue here is not that they find the movie too scary, but the fact the Blob ends up sneaking into the same theatre and wreaking havoc. Kevin makes it out alive, but his friend Eddie isn't so lucky.
• Kill It with Ice: The Blob can be defeated by exposure to subzero temperatures, which can eventually freeze it completely solid. Even this doesn't truly kill it however; once the ice melts, the frozen pieces spring right back to life.
• Knight Templar: The scientist Dr. Meddows, who wants to control the Blob so that he can create a weapon that can put US Military ahead of Russian Military. All patriotic and stuff but then he deems the town expendable.
• I'm Melting!: Anyone caught by the Blob suffers this fate, if they aren't crushed into gruesome shapes first. The Blob completely digests every part of its victims, bones and clothing included. Some people are also seen in half-melted heaps. Excellent special effects don't leave any part of it to the imagination.
• It Came from the Sink: A man trying to fix a clogged sink puts his hand down the drain and ends up getting sucked up and killed by the titular blob.
• Literally Shattered Lives: The Blob is defeated when its lured near some tanks of liquid nitrogen that are blown up, flash-freezing its mass and turning it into an enormous pile of frozen crystallized chunks.
• Lovable Jock: Paul, in contrast with his friend Scott, is an all-around helpful, decent guy. Pity that one of his good deeds leads directly to his horrific death.
• Match Cut: When the (initially small) blob from the meteor first envelops and begins slurping up the Can Man's arm, we cut to Kevin slurping up some Jell-O for dessert at home. Chances are you wouldn't notice that since this is the first death by Blob you see fully on-screen.
• Man on Fire: One of the troops is set on fire after the Blob obstructs his flamethrower and causes it to explode.
• Meaningful Background Event: When the Blob is consuming Paul, its back end can be seen beginning to slip out the window in the shot out of focus, explaining how it escaped the hospital.
• Mega-Microbes: The Blob is a disease bioweapon (contradictorily stated to be bacterial or viral) that was deemed too dangerous and launched into space, where it was mutated by cosmic radiation into an actively predatory beast that crashed back to Earth.
• Mexican Standoff: Before the final fight with the Blob, Brian gets into one with Meddows, his men, and Deputy Briggs. During this time, he reveals Meddows's true nature, and the distracted Meddows gets killed.
• Mistaken for Murderer: Brian is considered the prime suspect in Paul's death, partly because he was the only other person said to be present at the time, partly because the two never liked each other to begin with, and partly because he had a long record of delinquency prior. Only Meg, who saw Paul get eaten right in front of her, knows the truth.
• Mythology Gag: The film takes two playful shots at the original film, in which the Blob looks a lot like a glob of strawberry Jello or jam rather than the pinkish mass of amorphous tentacles in this version:
  • When Brian and Meg are in the diner, Brian knocks over a can from a shelf and spills its red slurry of contents all over the floor. He quips, "Looks like I just killed the strawberry jam!"
  • When the Blob is about to absorb a victim, we get a Match Cut to Kevin sucking up some strawberry Jello.
• Nigh-Invulnerability: The titular monster is nearly impossible to injure, since it doesn't have anything to injure. Bullets only attract its attention, a flamethrower is only a minor nuisance, bombs have absolutely no effect. Whether or not it feels pain from any of this is a slightly different matter, since a bomb being thrown right on top of it into the sewers really pisses it off, enough for the Blob to stop pulling any punches and try to eat the entire town right then and there, but it's definitely not enough to cause any lasting damage. Only freezing cold temperatures have any reactionary effect on it, and even that doesn't kill it, since we see it can survive being frozen solid.
• No Body Left Behind: The blob completely absorbs its victims, flesh, cloth and bones. Whether it’s transforming the victim into it like in the original or dissolving them, like in the remake.
• No OSHA Compliance: In the film's climax, the Blob traps the remaining townspeople in the town hall building, because apparently, despite its ample supply of fire extinguishers, it doesn't have any doors in the back they could escape from.
• Noisy Nature:
  • A sewer rat squeaks very loudly as it floats past the characters on a broken piece of board.
  • The Blob itself. It somehow growls, shrieks, and squeals at times despite the fact it has absolutely no organs that could possibly be used to make sounds.
• Non-Malicious Monster: Just like the original, the Blob is simply a predator trying to consume. On the other hand, sometimes it does seem to display an uncanny intelligence combined with a rather cruel, almost sadistic malevolence...
• Novelization: A rather decent one by David Bischoff (who also wrote the Novelization for Gremlins 2: The New Batch). The book not only contains elements from the original script, including different character names (such as Meddows being called Bruno Trimble), it even has some scenes told from the Blob's point of view. Somehow. Some of the changes between the film and novelization include:
  • Scenes where The Blob is shown eating wildlife, including a scene deleted from the film where it ate a little squirrel.
  • The addition of a monkey in the projection room. It investigates the open vent, and then is consumed by The Blob that's hiding in it. The projectionist happens to see it go in and tries to get him out, at which point he gets attacked by the monster.
• Offing the Mouth: As the Blob breaks into the cinema, the first theatergoer it snacks on is a heckler in the back row who has been annoying Kevin and Eddie the entire film.
• Orifice Invasion: The girl who got drunk by the Jerk Jock didn't have any visible damage or even scream, leading to some... ideas of how it got inside her.
• Plot Armor: Meg has a ton of it once she's revealed as one of the real protagonists; the Blob usually just menaces her or reaches out with pseudopods at the last moment, instead of just falling on her from some hidden nook like the rest of the victims. A few of her companions - Paul and Eddie - aren't so lucky, caught and digested alive and screaming in front of her.
• Police Are Useless: Subverted. Sheriff Geller comes across as quite reasonable... but unfortunately is one of the Blob's early victims, leaving his churlish deputy, Briggs, in charge. Who also comes around in the end and dies trying to help.
• Quarantine with Extreme Prejudice: The entire town is isolated by military personnel under the public image of a medical crisis, but in reality Meddows sees the local populace as expendable guinea pigs and doesn't want anyone to find out what's really going on, and is willing to have people shot trying to leave or enter.
• Reasonable Authority Figure:
  • Sheriff Geller gives Flagg fair warning that, as a legal adult, if he screws up now, "(he's) in the majors." Later, he quickly figures out that Flagg couldn't have murdered Paul since Flagg didn't have a single drop of blood on him from what was, after all, an extremely gruesome murder, lets him go, and resumes searching for the real killer. To his misfortune, he finds it.
  • Eventually Briggs gets there as well, after Brian reveals Meddows true nature and the true nature behind the government's involvement in creating the Blob. He eventually gets killed fighting it.
• Redemption Equals Death:
  • Col Hargis and the rest of the men finally reach the breaking point when Meddows orders them to kill Flagg. After they turn on him and Meddows is killed, Hargis orders everyone to hit the Blob with everything they've got. It isn't enough.
  • Deputy Briggs loathes Brian Flagg and acts like a complete asshole in general, but comes to Flagg's eventual defense when Meddows demands he be shot. He then sees the Blob in it's true glory and rushes to aid the other townspeople in escaping from it. It eventually kills him.
• Red Shirt Army: The soldiers accompanying the scientists are useless, though their poorer performance compared to the main characters when fighting the Blob might be attributed to the heavy NBC gear they are wearing.
• Remake Cameo: Del Close appeared in the sequel to the original movie, Beware! The Blob, as a hobo. Here, he plays Reverend Meeker. Amusingly, in both movies he ends up wearing an eyepatch.
• The Reveal: The Blob isn't an alien like it was in the original film; it's a biological weapons experiment developed against the Soviets which was launched into orbit because it was too dangerous and ended up crashing back down. The "meteor" that it came down in was actually the satellite it was contained in.
• Rescue Equipment Attack: When Meg uses a fire extinguisher to put out flaming gas on the town priest, she instinctively blasts at one of the Blob's pseudopods when it tries to grab her. The creature howls in pain and recoils, making her realize it dislikes cold. When the townsfolk are trapped by the Blob inside city hall, they're able to keep it at bay with the building's fire extinguishers, but unlike the original film, it's not enough to actually freeze it.
• Satchel Charge: Satchel charges are used twice at the climax to try to destroy the Blob. The first time, the satchel charge causes a nice big fireball but does nothing to the monster. The second time, the satchel charge is used to blow up a truck full of liquid nitrogen, which freezes the Blob solid and stops it for good.
• Sealed Evil in a Can: In the end, the Blob is contained as Meg & Ryan manage to freeze it and the townspeople transport it to the ice house. However, Reverend Meeker has kept a smaller sample of the Blob.
• Sequel Hook: The Arborville priest has kept a chunk of the Blob in a bottle, opening the possibility that it could attack again.
• Shout-Out: To the works of Stephen King. Not only does the plot (government creates a biological weapon which could cause The End of the World as We Know It) bear a passing resemblance to that of The Stand, screenwriter Frank Darabont named two of the movie's characters (Brian Flagg and "Can Man") after two from The Stand (Randall Flagg and Trashcan Man). Additionally, Meg Penny is named after Pennywise from It.
• Sinister Minister: The final scene shows Reverend Meeker having gone off the deep end, preaching a fire and brimstone apocalyptic sermon... and having kept a small piece of the Blob for the very purpose of starting said apocalypse when "the Lord will give him a sign".
• Soundtrack Dissonance: A surprisingly dark and tension filled sci fi horror movie with a somewhat unsettling ending plays over the credits...a generic Hair Metal Intercourse with You song.
• Spared by the Adaptation: Both the doctor and the nurse aren’t amongst the Blob’s victims, unlike the original where they were the next ones after the old man. The doctor seemingly vanishes after calling the nurse and the nurse herself never appears.
• Super-Persistent Predator: The Blob expends a huge amount of effort hunting Meg, Eddie, and Kevin specifically, rather than the huge crowd of moviegoers that just ran out the door of the theatre. It smashes through a locked door, seeps through a manhole cover, and follows them through the sewers.
• Terror at Make-Out Point: This trope is played with. The Jerk Jock has driven to a secluded spot and gotten his date drunk so he can have his way with her. He looks away for a minute, then begins to unbutton her blouse. When he reaches in, the Blob, who has eaten the girl from the far side, out of his immediate view, grabs him and consumes him.
• Too Dumb to Live:
  • Surprisingly rare in this creature feature; however, one of the chief mooks, upon encountering the Blob with his squad, reminds them "We have orders not to shoot!" - just before the Blob consumes him. The others promptly throw the orders out the window and start fighting for their lives. The various other characters make reasonable decisions throughout the film, though even then, it still doesn't save some of them.
  • Fran however is definitely this. She manages to escape from her locked-up diner by smashing the window and climbing out while the Blob is distracted inside. She drops down into the empty street, with what looks like a solid headstart as the Blob is still nowhere to be seen. You'd expect her to do the smart thing and run as far away from the building as possible. Instead she runs into the nearby phone booth to try and call the sheriff. Naturally, the Blob soon catches up and envelopes the phone booth, taunting her with the corpse of the sheriff before it easily smashes through the container and devours her.
  • After one of the troops is set on fire after the Blob obstructs his flamethrower and causes it to explode, he just runs around screaming instead of trying to "stop, drop and roll." Another character puts out the fire, but not before he is badly burned.
• Took a Level in Badass: Meg starts the movie as a happy, innocent cheerleader living an obviously sheltered lifestyle. During the climax, we see her climbing atop a crashed snowmaker truck, firing an M16 full auto against the titular monster while screaming at it, and then setting up a satchel charge to blow up the truck's liquid nitrogen tanks and take the creature with it.
• Trojan Gauntlet: Paul and Scott go buy condoms at the town pharmacy, where they also happen to run into the town priest, making the entire thing even more awkward. As it turns out, the pharmacist is actually the father of Paul's date Meg. Ribbed indeed.
• Weaksauce Weakness: The Blob becomes an unstoppable juggernaut at the end, laughing at bullets, fire, and physical attacks. But the protagonists manage to (temporarily) hold it off with fire extinguishers and ultimately defeats it by crashing a truck full of liquid nitrogen into its mass, freezing it into quartzlike crystals.
• Wham Shot:
  • The military personnel are seen lifting the "meteor" that the Blob landed to Earth in... showing a clearly artificial metal shell with an American flag on it, revealing that this iteration of the creature was of manmade origin.
  • The final shot of the film reveals that Reverend Meeker kept the Blob sample he put into a jar. Moreover, he plans on setting it free when "the Lord" gives him a sign.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: The doctor. He didn't hear Paul and Meg's screaming and come running? Ditto the nurse. The doctor may however have been calling for outside help after seeing what happened to the homeless victim.
• Wise Old Folk Façade: Dr. Christopher Meddows initially appears to be a helpful old government scientist who wants to protect the town and the protagonists from the rampaging Blob. As it turns out, he created the Blob by sending the Blob sample into space and is using the quarantine to create a suitable testing ground for the Blob.
• Why Isn't It Attacking?: Meg and Brian are cornered in the diner's walk-in freezer by the Blob and prepare to go down fighting as it starts to seep in underneath the door. However, the moment it touches the ice crystals on the floor, it shrieks, pulls itself back, and flees, much to their confusion. It's not until much later do they realize it was warded off by the cold.
• You Must Be Cold: Brian gives Meg his leather jacket when they're hiding from the Blob in the diner's walk-in freezer.

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