Byron Keith, an actor known for his work in cult cinema, made notable appearances in The Great Bank Robbery (1969) and Beware! The Blob (1972). His roles often reflect the quirky and offbeat nature of the genres he inhabited, contributing to the distinctive flavor of exploitation films. In The Stranger (1946), Keith's performance adds a layer of intrigue to the narrative, demonstrating his ability to engage audiences in unconventional storytelling. His contributions to these films solidify his place in the pantheon of cult cinema.
Beware! The Blob
Picking up fifteen years after the events of the first movie, The Blob, an oil pipeline engineer named Chester (Godfrey Cambridge) returns to his suburban Los Angeles home from the North Pole, bringing with him a small sample of a mysterious frozen substance uncovered by a bulldozer on a job site, a story which he tells his wife. Not aware that the substance is a piece of the Blob from the original 1958 incident in Pennsylvania, Chester comes home to store the substance in his home freezer prior to taking in to the laboratory to be analyzed. However, he and his wife Marianne (Marlene Clark) accidentally let it thaw, re-animating the Blob. It starts by eating a fly, then a kitten, then Marianne, and then, in an intentional anachronism by the film makers, while Chester is watching a television broadcast of the film The Blob, it eats him, too. Lisa (Gwynne Gilford), a friend, walks in to see Chester in the final stages of being consumed by the Blob. She escapes, but cannot get anyone to believe her, not even her boyfriend Bobby (Robert Walker Jr.). Meanwhile, the rapidly growing creature quietly preys upon the town. Some of its victims include a police officer and two hippies (Cindy Williams and Randy Stonehill) in a storm drain, a barber (Shelley Berman) and his client, transients (played by director Hagman, Burgess Meredith and Del Close), a Scoutmaster (Dick Van Patten), a farm full of chickens and horses, people in a gas station, and various townspeople who turn up "missing". At one point, Lisa and Bobby find themselves trapped in Bobby's truck with the creature attempting to find a way inside. While panicking, the truck's air conditioning is accidentally switched on and the Blob retreats because of its vulnerability to cold. The now-massive Blob then invades a bowling alley and a skating rink, consuming dozens more people in the process. It is finally stopped when Bobby activates the rink's ice mechanism, freezing it. While the frozen Blob is being filmed by a television crew, one of the crew's bright lights is positioned on the ground, melting a small portion of it, which oozes toward the sheriff and envelops his feet as he is speaking on camera to a nationwide television audience.
