1958 Steve McQueen & a Town of Teenagers take on The BLOB

14 days ago
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The Blob is a 1958 American science fiction horror film directed by Irvin S. Yeaworth Jr. from a screenplay by Theodore Simonson and Kate Phillips, based on an idea by Irving H. Millgate.[3] It stars Steve McQueen (in his first leading role) and Aneta Corsaut and co-stars Earl Rowe and Olin Howland.
The film concerns a carnivorous amoeboidal alien that crashes to Earth from outer space inside a meteorite, landing near the small communities of Phoenixville and Downingtown, Pennsylvania. It envelops living beings, growing larger, becoming redder in color and more aggressive, eventually becoming larger than a building.
The film's tongue-in-cheek title song, "The Blob" [Columbia 42150A], was written by Burt Bacharach and Mack David. It became a nationwide hit in the United States, peaking at #33 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart on November 9, 1958. It was recorded by a studio group who adopted the name The Five Blobs. (The vocals are all by singer Bernie Knee, overdubbing himself.) It is commonly misbelieved that Bacharach wrote the song with his famous songwriting partner, Hal David, but David's brother Mack wrote the lyrics
The Blob was distributed by Paramount Pictures as a double feature with I Married a Monster from Outer Space.
Paramount acquired The Blob for $300,000 from Jack Harris and spent another $300,000 promoting it. According to Tim Dirks, it was one of a wave of "cheap teen movies" for the drive-in market—"exploitative, cheap fare created especially for [young people] in a newly-established teen/drive-in genre".
Harris eventually bought back the rights from Paramount and Allied Artists Pictures Corporation, and reissued it as a double feature with his and Yeaworth's Dinosaurus! in 1964.
Beware! The Blob, a sequel directed by Larry Hagman, was released in 1972.[26] The same creature from the original—this time starting as a small specimen unearthed by a bulldozer crew in the Arctic—is brought back to suburban Los Angeles, where it escapes. Presented as a "horror comedy", the film was also released under the title Son of Blob in 1972. As this was Hagman's first feature film as director, home video releases used the tagline, "The Movie That J.R. Shot", a play on "Who shot J.R.?", the famous catchphrase about the near-demise of the character Hagman played in the television series Dallas.

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