YMMV / The Blob (1958)

• Cult Classic: The film gained quite the impressive cult following decades after its release. Phoenixville (one of the film's shooting locations) holds an annual "Blobfest" celebrating the movie, complete with a special screening and a traditional reenactment of the movie theater scene (held at the actual movie theater shown in the film, the Colonial Theatre).
• Fridge Brilliance: Towards the beginning of the movie the blob is seen as light grey where later on it appears red. The reason? It turns red from absorbing the blood of its victims.
• Harsher in Hindsight: The movie's assurance that the Blob will not be dangerous "as long as the Arctic stays cold" might have sounded like a pretty sure thing in the 1950s, but in the era of Global Warming, it's a much more Esoteric Happy Ending.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • In Italy the clip in which Dave says "It's the most horrible thing I've ever seen in my life" is the most known quote due to its use in the TV show Blob, and it gave the original film newfound attention because of it.
  • If The Blob's theme music hasn't become this yet, it may after being invoked in an Ask Me Anything hosted by Bill Cipher.
• Narm Charm: Even by today’s standards, the movie is still really entertaining, with good pacing, good dialogue and really memorable characters. It’s also helped by the fact that it has quite a playful tone, even for its time.
• One-Scene Wonder: Olin Howlin as the man who first gets the Blob stuck on his hand. He's honestly a little too good at portraying the pain of the experience.
• Paranoia Fuel:
  • The Blob can come out of anywhere and glue itself on and absorb you, which means you're practically dead the moment it touches you.
  • Near the end of the movie, characters speculate that the Blob has probably killed a lot of people who were asleep in their own homes, given that the Blob can squeeze through the cracks between doors and doesn't make any noise when it attacks.
• Questionable Casting: Steve McQueen playing the teenage protagonist Steve Andrews. He looks and acts so mature that he could easily pass for a man in his thirties, making some of his early scenes come off as bizarre. Why is this grown-ass man taking a girl to Make-Out Point or getting pressured into street races by other grown-ass men?
• Retroactive Recognition: Steve McQueen obviously went on to bigger and better things. Also, Steve's girlfriend Jane is played by Anita Corsaut, who became familiar to TV viewers a few years later as schoolteacher Helen Crump on The Andy Griffith Show.
• Signature Scene: The Blob breaking into the theater is easily the most iconic setpiece of the movie and usually shown to represent the '50s era of Sci-Fi cinema among others.
• So Bad, It's Good: By modern standards, the film is not in the least bit scary and so clichéd it comes out as this.
• Spiritual Antithesis: To X the Unknown. In a monochrome atmosphere of nuclear menace, its Blob Monster crawls from deep underground in search of radiation and, as a by-product hereof, melts people. The Blob, in cheerfully lurid colour, lands in a meteorite. Instead of radiation, it absorbs any living matter it can get its slime on.
• Unintentional Period Piece: Steve and the gang have to borrow a dime to call the police on a pay phone to report an emergency. When the cop on the other end ignores their pleas, they say it was a waste of a dime. The film was made about ten years before the 911 service allowed Americans to make emergency calls for free from anywhere.

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