I confess it feels a little weird to place “The Blob” in my collection of film reviews. After all, it’s got to be one of the most commented upon horror films of all time.

Nonetheless, I watched it with my wife and her mom several nights ago, and it seems worth commenting upon.

You must know the plot. Teenager Steve (played by a very not-teenaged Steve McQueen) and his date see a meteor crash to Earth. They source it to a rural area where an old man has a strange crimson substance on his arm. Things progress, and the blob eats the old man and many others while Steve, his groovy buddies, and the cops try to stop it.

For a long time, there was commentary that the movie was a warning about communism, another red menace that absorbs individuals into a mass. But my understanding is that people connected to the film say it isn’t so. (The same claim was made about the superior “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.”)

What I was struck by is the similarity between the film and the H.P. Lovecraft story “The Color Out of Space.” But I could find no evidence that the film is any sort of homage, and the Lovecraft story gets into vastly weirder territory. (The Nic Cage film version is quite good, too.)

 It is a example of the kind of horror the film “Cold Storage” (recently reviewed in these fine pages) focused on. These films realize the terror something that gets into your system and changes you. This is probably some primal human fear about disease and aging. We see it in zombie films. We see it in films about people going insane.

What are we left with? Is “the Blob” merely unambitious schlocko-horror with nothing profound to say about society?

Maybe that’s not so bad.