Blobermouth

I watched this in two parts like I did with The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra. With each movie, I got a little tired of them at the halfway point. But I did enjoy a lot of Blobermouth. First of all, I remember being a big fan of the original but had not seen it in year. Watching it with a different soundtrack shows that very little happens in the movie (lots of talk). There are some very clever jokes in this version, particularly from the female lead. When the characters go into shadows, they will shout "Where did my head go!" And the Aunt Bea segment is an absolute riot--dead on! They also make fun of Steve McQueen keeping his hands in his pockets. However, the musical breaks are needless and unfunny. The animated lips on The Blob are annoying at first, but once he continues to deliver Henny Youngman jokes, the character becomes funnier. They mostly get it right, it is just a little long.

The L.A. Connection are a comedy troupe who did live performances at the Nuart Theatre in the early '90s, several of which I attended. They would show some campy '50s movie with the sound turned off and recite their own (scripted) dialog over it, in the manner of "What's Up, Tiger Lily?" This is a recording of one such revision, that of the original 1958 "The Blob."

Some people see nothing at all funny in this sort of thing. I must confess that I am an easy audience, as I have always found this premise intrinsically funny no matter what is done with it. But even with that caveat, I insist that the L.A. Connection do it better than anyone else. Every gesture and nuance of the actors on screen is incorporated into the new dialog in hilarious fashion. They also contrive an entirely new "story" around the action. In "What's Up, Tiger Lily?" Woody Allen kept the original notion that it was a spy story, whereas if the Connection had done it, they would have made it about something completely different. Whatever kind of comic genius it takes to do that, I wish I had it.

My only quibble with this preserved record is that, unlike the live performances where the film was untampered with, this version has occasional animation, music video-style editing, and a "plot" recap at the midpoint, all of which are unnecessary. But that didn't stop me from laughing through the whole thing. I am delighted to have this tape as a memento of the performances I saw, and I wish they would release more of them.