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 Most everyone in England wakes up one morning blinded by a mysterious meteor shower the night before and if that wasn't a bad enough way to start the day, a bunch of killer plants start rampaging. 1981, 150 minutes
Here's what I'm going to recommend to sensitive British chap Bill, the star of this BBC miniseries: a little less time giving me lectures about how we shouldn't have a bunch of satellites in space protecting our national security and a whole lot more killer plant fighting. It isn't bad enough that Bill is unable to contain his socialist/commie views to himself for the full two and a half hours of things, but once he decides to unload on us, he just pulls it straight out of his bum! Where else would his theory that everyone on Earth had been blinded not by killer meteors in league with killer plants (the most common sense explanation) but by some weapon up in space equipped with blinding radiation that went haywire and fried everyone's optic nerve? Did your teachers ever tell you about the smell test? Basically, it posits that if the answer you came up with smells like it came from inside Bill's left wing bum, then it probably did!
Lame speech at the end of movie aside, what you have here is a much more faithful version of John Wyndham's novel than 1962's The Day Of The Triffids. I haven't read the book in many years, but this miniseries couldn't help but be more faithful considering that the atrocious movie from 1962 ended with our hero defeating the Triffids by turning a fire hose full of salt water on them! This one ended on a more sour note with Bill retreating to the Ilse of Wight, but pledging in a voice over narration that he would someday be back to retake his homeland from those pesky plants. As wimpified as Billy spent most of the movie (how in the world do you let yourself get kidnapped and held captive by a bunch of blind people?), I wouldn't be making any reservations to see Wimbledon any time soon if I were you, unless that is you wouldn't mind seeing those Williams sisters get all stung up by the carnivorous fauna that's running roughshod over center court.
This version of things improves on the first film in every category and ditches a lot of the bogus things that either didn't work or made no sense. For instance, despite being twice as long, we no longer have the stupidly distracting second story line of the couple doing research in a light house. We also don't have the little blind girl that tags along to play on our sympathies. Sure, Bill picks up a little girl, but she can see and that happens really late in the movie. There's also none of this crap where our hero travels to Spain to find an American military base. In this movie, the only hope you have is to get to an island where the Triffids can be hunted down without new ones moving in (Triffids can't swim) and there is no sign of a government anywhere.
The focus in the miniseries is more on the day to day survival after civilization collapses into a screaming mass of sightless Britons bumping into one another than on going at it with those demon weeds. You would think that this shift away from straight ahead action while almost doubling the running time would result in a deadly dull experience, but nothing could be further from the truth. It's precisely because they have this chunk of time, that they can develop this new world and Bill's reactions to everything that's going on in it. There's time to flesh out the backstory regarding the Triffids as well, though I'll have to confess that it wasn't as clear as it could have been. Would you believe that back in the sixties, the Triffids were farmed for their oil? Huh? Bill recounts a lot of stuff about shadowy business behind the Iron Curtain and a Russian scientist and I was never real sure if these Triffids were engineered or occurred in the wild or what. I thought the same meteor shower that blinded everyone caused them to appear, but without that plot point, Bill is left to clumsily explain how it is that we could have two really bad situations dovetailing at once (worldwide blindness and Triffids run amok). And if you've been mucking about with the Triffids in captivity for twenty years, wouldn't you have developed a non-lethal variety just in case they did get loose?
All this business with Triffid raising and research allows Bill to be a guy that works at a Triffid research facility. Surprisingly, this doesn't play into the story very much other than the fact that he takes the threat of the Triffids seriously and makes sure he's well armed when he's out and about. Interestingly enough, Bill steadfastly refuses to believe throughout the film that the Triffids have any sort of intelligence and thinks they're acting purely on instinct. Maybe he starts giving them some more credit towards the end of the film, but his "Triffids are just dumb old killer plants" worldview flies in the face of everything we see from them. They lurk around people's houses waiting for them to come outside. They stand at the electrified fence, trying to get inside of it, but don't touch it when they can hear the generator running. They even imitate Bill's girlfriend's voice so that he thinks he's cuddling up to her one night and not to a killer plant! Okay, I can't remember for sure, but I may have made that last one up. The point is that throughout the movie, these things are out and about stalking humans and mysteriously take advantage of the fact that everyone is suddenly blind (how did they know?).
Bill relates most of the setup for things while he's laid up in a hospital bed recovering from some temporary blindness that resulted when he got a dose of Triffid poison down at the Triffid farm. This coincides with the big meteor shower everyone watches, which is how he escapes the fate suffered by so many others. I find it a bit difficult to believe that this could actually happen today (especially since all our killer satellites with blinding rays are purely defensive in nature). This movie acts like 99% of the population was out looking at these fool lights. Maybe it would have been that widespread back in 1981 when you had three channels and they were showing stuff like It's A Living, Flo and The Misadventures Of Sheriff Lobo. Now you've got a couple a hundred channels, DVDs, video games, and the Internet just to name a few of the reasons none of us see the outside of our singlewide trailer. Also, it isn't dark all across the world simultaneously, so unless these flashing lights were running for most of the day and night, some countries wouldn't ever see them. That also doesn't take into account all the places that bad weather and/or clouds prevented people from seeing anything. Heck, even if it had gone down back in 1981 I wouldn't have sweated it since I would have been inside watching The White Shadow.
As Bill lollygags in his hospital bed waiting for someone to take off his bandages, he finally comes to the conclusion that something is wrong when he hears the clock toll eight and the doctor was supposed to be around at seven. He takes off the bandages himself and starts looking around the hospital. Let's see, blind guy in a bed, dead person on the floor, mass of humanity piled up in a heap unable to decide whether to go up or down the stairs. Yep, looks like the apocalypse went and started without me, thinks Bill. He runs into his now blinded doctor and goes off to try and find help, but when he returns the doctor is laying on the pavement two or three stories below. If Bill was cool (i.e. an American action hero) he would've snorted something like "he should've taken the stairs" but since he's British he just stares silently for a moment then leaves. We're a much more colorful people than the British!
Once Bill's outside, it's pretty much 28 Days Later territory but with giant celery stalks instead of super fast zombies. Actually, there's more danger to a sighted person from the blind crybabies than from the Triffids at this point. Anytime a gaggle of these blind folks sniffs out a guy or gal with sight, they descend upon them desperate for someone to lead them to food. It works both ways though, since there are gangs of guys lead by sighted men that kidnap blind women to satisfy their own group's perverted needs. These British people are so vile! Society disintegrates and in one day they're acting like a high school football team! And what's with Bill trying to be noble and take these guys on without either heavy duty firearms or some kick ass kung fu? He just gets punched in the nose and that's the end of the fight! Sorry about that lady! Better luck next time. In Bill's defense, he did rescue his future girlfriend Jo from a guy. A blind guy. Tell me again who's going to be retaking their homeland from an army of mutant plants?
With Jo in tow, Bill goes to where a bunch of people who can still see are meeting and deciding what to do next. Their plan is to repopulate the planet ASAP and you know what that means - polygamy! Each guy who can see gets one chick that can also see and a couple of broads that can't see. And boy better be some kind of stallion or he's out of there! Jo and Bill decide to join up (I imagine it was more of a struggle for Jo than for Bill), but before that can go down, the blind attack! Whatever happened to this invasion of the giant rutabagas? A sighted guy named Coker is leading the blind and takes people that can see prisoner with the idea that they will each be forced to take care of a gang of the blind. Just when it seems all is lost, though, a miracle occurs. A plague starts wiping out the blind people! I'm sure that was all our fault too, Bill!
Bill finally gets free of the blind people and spends a good deal of the movie trying to find Jo and avoiding the ever encroaching Triffids. One of the good things about the movie was that it wasn't just about the Triffids causing problems. More time was spent on the difficulties encountered just from the blindness. In fact, there were large stretches of the movie where you never dealt with the Triffids and most people didn't even see them as an overpowering threat at first. It was only as humanity became more fractured and isolated that these things really manifested themselves regularly. It certainly isn't the flashiest program you'll ever lay eyes on and it's obvious that however many pounds were spent on it, not much of them went toward the Triffids, but for fans of "end of the world" movies, it's a more thoughtful handling of things and makes a good stab at believability, at least as far as the aftermath is concerned (though I had to wonder whether the entire governmental structure would disappear over night). Vastly superior to the previous version and worth taking a look at, if you can find it.
Reviews © 2004
MonsterHunter
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