“We are all cruel beasts.”

This line, spoken in Poor Things, is actually at odds with the movie’s message, and more in line with what we’d typically expect from Yorgos Lanthimos as a chronicler of life’s cold, oddball characters. His new film, screened in competition at the Venice Film Festival, is surprisingly moving… as well as deliciously foul-mouthed. Slicked with sexy abandon, Poor Things takes Alasdair Gray’s “unfilmable novel” from 1992 and surgically transforms it into a mordantly funny fairytale about female agency and bodily autonomy. Flamboyant, florid, fantastic, and freakish, this might well be one of the most unique movies you’ll ever see.

Sixty-five years ago this month, an iconic horror movie made a star out of Steve McQueen and showed disappointingly little of its titular character.

That movie, The Blob, involves a goo that crashes down to Earth, and McQueen as a tough teen who tries to warn others of the encroaching sentient slime. (And it features plenty of outdated gender problems, like teen girls who don’t speak unless they’re talking about a puppy or their baby brother, because women are only useful for their maternal instincts.)

The Blob, whose origin of species is never explored, may seem quixotic but actually resembles an earthly slime mold, which also eats by capturing snacks in a process called phagocytosis — but on the microscopic scale. But even if we don’t have any real extraterrestrial plasms on Earth, The Blob bears some resemblance to one of the stranger creatures on our planet. In a way, it is a slime mold movie. After all, slime mold may be the closest we ever get to a real Blob.