chuck russell | Camera Viscera

It was the late-’80s, and we were smack dab in the middle of The Great VHS Boom. I believe it was Herbert Hoover who once promised, “a VCR in every home, and a membership to every mom & pop video store” – and that’s exactly what every family (including ours) had. And with the proliferation of VCRs came a wave of home recordings. No rental was safe from being recorded to a blank Kodak tape (or Polaroid, Sony, RCA, Fuji, et al.) You just had to make sure your recording speed was set to LP, and to put a little piece o’tape over that broken tab on the back, and you were in business. Sure, it was illegal. But it was the ’80s, and everyone was doing it. Continue reading STUFF THAT SCARED ME: A Home Recording of A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 3 →

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.