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I actually have an old Star Classics VHS version so the back of the box says
almost nothing about the film. "An alien invasion disguised as a meteor shower
bombards the Earth." Most everyone is blinded and these seeds that landed with
the meteor shower grow into "man-eating plants devouring everyone in their
path." 1962, 95 minutes, VHS
You know, for being chunks of rock whizzing through the air, filmmakers sure do
give meteors a lot of credit when it comes to contributing to the end of
civilization as we know it. Without doing any extensive research and just
working from my beer-adled memory, I can recall films where meteors (or comets)
have been blamed for such various debacles as, making the dead walk the earth,
turning people into dust, causing all electrical devices to rebel against their
human masters (especially the semi with the Green Goblin on the front), and
causing plants to run around eating people. This non-exhaustive tally does not
include the movies where meteors do more routine damage like causing tidal
waves and blocking out the sun with the debris they kicked up on deep impact
causing Armageddon to ensue.
The Day of the Triffids deals with the issue of
what happens when a real purty meteor shower happens and everyone looks at it
and goes blind. To give you a little more bang for your meteor-apocalypse
dollar, they also throw in the fact that this meteor shower had the
double-effect of not only making us all blind, but of creating these really
tall, ugly, lurching plants called Triffids that walk around sniffing out
finger-licking good humans for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. In watching the
movie, it never became clear to me how these dumb plants actually went about
"devouring" the humans as the back of the video box promised. As near as I
could tell, the plants whipped you with some kind of stinger, slashing you in
the face and killing you. I sure didn't see anyone get picked up in their
clutches and dumped down their gaping maw. Heck, I couldn't even tell if they
had a gaping maw or if they just had a really big flower for a head or what.  Since the meteor shower turns everyone blind who looks at it, the story
necessitates some reasons why the main characters weren't out watching the
fireworks with the rest of the sheep. The main dude named Bill, is a sailor
who luckily enough has suffered an eye injury which required that his eyes be
all gauzed-up during the meteor shower. There is a married couple who are off
studying marine life or something on a desolate hunk of rock in a lighthouse.
You'd think with nothing to do but look at squid and trout that they would have
ducked out one of the windows in the lighthouse and snuck a peek, but I guess
they didn't. There is also a girl who is befriended by Bill and follows him
around the whole movie who isn't blind, but I don't recall what excuse, if any,
the movie gave to explain how she avoided being blinded.
So you got Bill, who
wakes up rearing to go and face the world with his brand new eyes, but for some
reason the nurses aren't coming and no one responds to his shouts and
button-pressing from his bed, so he takes his own bandages off. As his eyes
come into focus, he figures out that no one is around and goes out to see if
everyone took a coffee break or had a code blue on another floor or something.
Eventually he runs into his eye doctor and after doing an eye exam on him (the
irony!), the eye doctor and he figure out that he's blind. One would have
thought the doctor would have figured it out when he opened his eyes and still
couldn't see anything, but then I've never been blind, have I? The doctor
tells Bill to go in his office and get a leather bag or something and while
Bill is in there he hears glass breaking. He runs out to the other room and
sees that the doctor has taken the easy way out, swan diving into the street
below. Way to keep a stiff upper lip, you British baby!
Bill figures that he's done everything he can at the hospital and heads out
onto the streets of London. There he finds some wrecked cars and some blind
people wandering about. Whenever anyone figures out he can see, they all
pester him to help them out, take them somewhere, make a call for them, hook
them up with some swingers, that kind of thing. Eventually he gets to a train
station and we get see a train wreck right there in the station. He also
finds a little girl who isn't blind and saves her from some blind slug that
tries to snatch her to be his eyes. They leave together and start to make
their way across London to his ship. Apparently Bill thinks that even though
the world has ended, he still needs to make it back before his three day pass
is up. I guess he wouldn't be the first sailor to show up at his ship with an
eight year old on his arm, but since everyone is blind he could tell them she
was something like 15 or 16 to keep himself out of the brig.
Along the way,
stuff blows up, airplanes crash, and these weird looking plants kill a dog.
Bill does a doubletake at this dead dog and wonders what's up, but then decides
the dog is just sleeping something off and leaves with his child-bride.
Nothing's shaking at the boat, so he decides they should go to France because
of something they heard on the radio about a meeting over there. He and the
little kid hop in a row boat and he starts a rowing all the way to France.
Meanwhile, in a completely different part of the movie we have the married
scientists at the lovely lighthouse getaway. Tom is a crabby guy who complains
that he thinks studying stingrays is boring and drinks a bunch a scotch, while
Karen is the nagging wife who thinks that Tom shouldn't be drinking so much,
even though she is obviously the reason why he's drinking. They listen on the
radio and hear that things kind of suck out in the world so Tom gets it in his
fool head that his next big project is to find a way to beat the killer plants,
the Triffids.
Now these plants apparently got all jacked up by the same meteor
that blinded everyone and now they can walk around and kill people. They are,
like any good supervillain, accompanied by their own sinister theme music (or
more accurately theme sounds) as they hobble across the landscape looking for
blind dummies who use their blindness as an excuse to just wander around
outside (find a building and go in and stay put!).
Every so often throughout
the rest of the movie we check in with these two and find that Tom is just as
successful at finding a way to stop the Triffids as he was in finding a wife
that understands his intake of scotch is strictly for "medicinal purposes."
Also, his wife gets terrorized by the plants whenever there is a lull in the
research.
Bill meanwhile has made it to France and found a house where a
couple of people who can see are housing a bunch of blind women. Bill meets
one the women who can still see and you can see that this is going to be what
passes for "the love interest" in this movie. Bill's a rambling man and can see
(hehe) that he needs to get out of there and go to Spain. He convinces this
woman that can see, Christine, that she should come with him and his little
friend. For the record, his convincing involves him rescuing her from a bunch
of convicts that have taken over the house and made all the blind girls their
dance partners during a very rowdy party.
Bill and his posse head off to Spain. Apparently there's some American
military base where people are being rescued. I'm not sure where they are
being rescued to, since these durn plants seem to be everywhere, but the
important part is to have a plan. The plan is to go to the base, so that's what
they try to do. Along the way, they meet up with a Spanish couple, help them
have a baby, set up an electric fence to deep-fry the Triffids, figure out
they're attracted to sound (like the sandworms on Dune!), make a big escape to
the base and live happily ever after.
Back on the other side of Triffid
County, Tom and Karen are burning the midnight oil trying to find a way to beat
back the menacing plants, and accidentally find a way when Tom turns a fire
house on them that's connected to sea water. Salt water destroys Triffids! We
have lots of that! We're saved! All we have to do is build our cities in the
oceans now! Then the movie just kind of ends, and you have to do the mental
work to figure that every thing turned out okay with a bunch of blind people
trying to silently spray millions of killer plants with salt water.
As you
may have surmised, the movie is pretty choppy and the dual story lines don't
really work together, since the lighthouse one was rarely seen. Bill's journey
isn't particularly arduous or interesting. He just gets in a car and goes
whenever he needs to. Salt water might destroy Triffids, but I bet they don't
do too well against getting run over by a semi either. The movie looked cheap and the Triffids just looked kind of goofy, not really all that threatening. You
want threatening? Try looking in the back of truck full of seedpods in the
original Invasion of the Body Snatchers!
The movie was based on a novel of the same name by John Wyndham (he also
wrote The Midwhich Cuckoos, later made into Village Of The Damned) and it's mucho
better than this slapdash effort. In the book, time was taken to flesh out
characters you were interested in seeing surviving and the situation seemed a
lot more dire than in the movie. Here, Bill just is basically on a European
holiday, occasionally having to beat back some plants like a tourist might have
ward of street beggars or something. They either needed to focus on a single
group of characters so that we get involved in their trials and tribulations or
they needed more time to flesh out the two sets of characters. A completely
botched effort that is best forgotten about. In 1981 the BBC did a miniseries
based on the novel and that's a much better and more faithful
adaptation than this ho-hum invading-monster flick. That's the one to watch if you manage to locate it anywhere.
Reviews © 2004
MonsterHunter
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