By Hank Reineke
In similar fashion
to the spectral forces that compelled Richard Dreyfuss to the base of Devil’s
Tower in Close Encounters of the Third
Kind, each July I’m similarly drawn to Phoenixville, Pennsylvania to celebrate
the Colonial Theatre’s annual Blobfest. As some of you may remember, the Colonial found
itself under attack in the closing reel of the classic sci-fi film The Blob (Paramount, 1958) and today, more than fifty
years on, the theater remains under siege.Â
With roots in the local community (the film was shot in and around
Phoenixville, Downington, and Chester
Springs, PA), The Blob remains,
without doubt, the uncontested star of the weekend’s ghoulish activities. But the gelatinous creature generously shares
his annual turn in the spotlight with fellow ne’er-do-well monsters of galactic
and science-gone-awry origin. Though I
enjoy Citizen Kane as much as the
next guy, Blobfest is more my kind of
cinematic event and I’m grateful that there are still movie-houses that offer
repertory programming beyond the usual mélange of classics sanctioned by the American
Film Institute. Though born in the
shadow of the Empire
State Building,
my yearly return to comparatively rural Phoenixville feels something of a
homecoming. Coming of age in the 1960s
and early 1970s, a too great percentage of my Saturday nights were misspent in
front of the family television watching ghoulish broadcasts of Chiller Theatre on WPIX and Creature Features on WNEW out of New York City. Similarly, weeknights, weekends, and recesses
were reserved for study of the gloomy stills featured in the pages of Famous Monsters of Filmland - and, when
you could find it on the newsstand, the far less celebrated Monster Times.Â