With a crew like Chuck Russell and Frank Darabont, make-up by Tony Gardner, and a cast including Kevin Dillon and Shawnee Smith (and Del Close and Bill Moseley), how can you go wrong?

While I don’t necessarily believe in the need for remakes (nor am I anti-remake — deep breaths), I would hope that the main motivations behind one would be the intention to improve — like in the case of this movie, updating the special effects to make The Blob a brutal, acidic globule. That’s exactly what The Blob does, and it does an amazing job. This blob is gross and ominous and truly threatening. And the damage it does to the people it encounters is painful looking, to say the least.

The plot line is pretty much the same as the original, save for a change of locations — a meteor crashes to Earth, and the space jelly contained inside starts wreaking havoc on the small town; not much needs to be improved upon there, the story is solid.

When it comes to remakes, this is one of the scant few I give a bloody, gnarled thumbs up.