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2 comments
1 comments
Rank This Matchup or Comment/Reply Below
on 5/10/2014
Your 1980s-horror-comedies-about-people-devouring-big-globs-of-goo. The Blob is more famous, and has better death scenes, but Larry Cohen's script here is probably his best. Very close, but... The Stuff.
Okay, I gave this a bit more thought... and I'm going to go with The Blob over The Stuff, but with a caveat: The Blob clearly had a bigger budget, and was made with The Stuff already being out for a few years, so they were able to go places The Stuff couldn't. Still very close though.
on 7/3/2014
I think about these two movies all the time, so it's great to see someone else weighing them. They're both excellent, but for very different reasons. Larry Cohen's The Stuff has hands-down my favorite Michael Moriarty performance, which is saying something as he's fantastic in his other Cohen collaborations (Q: The Winged Serpent and It's Alive 3: Island of the Alive). Man, his intro alone is a knockout. On the other hand, The Blob has what I consider THE BEST practical effects work of the era, besting Rob Bottin's work on The Thing, the movie I usually hear credited as the pinnacle of pre-CGI effect work. Every time the blob is on screen, it seems that the effect is achieved in a new and surprising way. The Blob's screenplay is just as important, avoiding a lot of the normal predictability of the genre, playing with who we anticipate to be the protagonist (the phone booth scene totally took my by surprise), and cutting out the standard fat of this type of movie. From start to finish, it just clips along, making it extremely re-watchable. The Stuff might be a more unique movie overall, and I'm in love with its tone, but The Blob wins on pure entertainment value. Unrelated, but when I think about how much I like The Blob's non-stop quality, I'm always reminded of my favorite hidden gem of all time, 1988's Miracle Mile. Highly recommended.
