The Day of the Triffids (1963)

Very best movie i ever watch

I really don't get the hype.

It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

It's a feast for the eyes. But what really makes this dramedy work is the acting.

THE DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS answers the question, "What sort of carnivorous plants could catch and consume a human being?". Well, an organized, mobile, extremely cunning army of them! After a freak meteor shower renders most of the world population blind, the sighted few remaining must find a way to survive against the alien threat of the title. Bill Masen (Howard Keel), a merchant marine recovering from eye surgery, is saved by his bandages, and seeks others w/ whom he can unite against the vicious vegetation. Simultaneously, an alcoholic scientist (Kieron Moore) and his long-suffering, biologist wife (Janette Scott) are holed up in a lighthouse, trying to figure out a way to defeat the menace. TRIFFIDS is a well-executed sci-fi horror film, taking what could easily have been a joke, and making a fantastic, suspenseful drama out of it. The scenes aboard an airplane in flight and a ship at sea are particularly effective in getting the point across: This is a global tragedy that could result in the extinction of the human race. Highly recommended...

The screenplay of The Day of the Triffids was probably extremely interesting to read, and even through the cheesy finished product, I was able to recognize the original worth of Bernard Gordon and Philip Yordan's script. I don't know if Steve Sekely and Freddie Francis's directing made the film silly, or if the studio insisted on turning the movie into a cheap horror movie. It starts with an extremely similar premise to Little Shop of Horrors: While everyone watches a meteor shower, they're blinded, and man-eating Venus Flytraps try to take over the world. The few people who didn't watch the meteor shower can still see, but the vast majority of the population are blind and helpless. Imagine an airplane full of blind passengers, crew, and pilots-an extremely suspenseful scene featured in the film!Howard Keel and Janina Faye team up to save the human race, while Kieron Moore and Janette Scott also try to stay safe amidst the chaos. The worst parts of the movie are the horror bits. Women scream and extremely fake plants attack, and the audience rolls their eyes at the silliness. Had the scary scenes been cut out or handled with more drama and class, the movie probably would have been very good. As it is, if you liked the original Little Shop of Horrors from 1960, you might like this one. Despite the presence of musical king Howard Keel, there are no songs in this one. It's still pretty interesting though, so give it a shot if the premise appeals to you.

Day of the Triffids was an excellent John Wyndham novel that, in the grand tradition, had been adapted for the screen here with many changes. The result is a story that has been simplified into an alien invasion movie. There is nothing particularly strange about this process though as even today screen adaptions of novels take substantial liberties in the transition. But my advice would nevertheless be to seek out the book as it is one of the great sci-fi novels of its era. The story here has a spectacular meteor shower blinding the population of Earth, except those who did not view it. At the same time, giant carnivorous alien plants called Triffids begin to dominate this world where the blind make easy prey. The story sort of makes me think of the later sub-genre of film, the zombie apocalypse movie. Both share aggressors who are multitudinous, murderous, unrelenting and with one-track minds; while those films also share the survivalist story lines where small groups of people must work out a way to successfully navigate the pandemic that sweeps their world.The Triffids do make for good monsters in what is essentially a creature-feature. The effects are a bit clunky at times but for its era this is still okay and shot in colour which wasn't exactly a given for this type of fayre in the early 60's. Like the original story it is set in Britain, although in the action does relocate to France and Spain latterly. But like a number of British genre films of the time such as the Quatermass films, this one features an American in the lead role as a means to no doubt make the product more marketable in the United States, in this case we have Howard Keel as the most pro-active survivor. It's a film that does work best in its earlier section where we witness the devastation of the meteor incident with hordes of blind milling around London helplessly in various locations, while we also see the early indicators of the dangers the Triffids present, they themselves are introduced in an atmospheric opening attack in a large indoor botanical garden. There is also a separate plot strand with a couple of scientists stranded in a lighthouse on a rock in the sea, needless to say our plant monsters make it out there, causing all manner of terrors. There is some decent suspense generated in this one at times and the production values are good enough overall. It's really quite an entertaining low-brow adaption of an ambitious book; taken for what it is, it's kind of fun.

I first saw this as a kid and of course I loved it. Back then a movie didn't have to make sense it just had to have monsters, explosions and for a child, relatively scary scenes. Subsequent viewings however have revealed the overwhelming number of plot holes and mistakes and seeing as I've read the book as well, this movie is fairly stupid, but good enough for a rainy day.Around 90% or more of the population is rendered blind after watching a meteor shower. I'm not even sure how that's possible as it's not dark all over the earth at the same time, but nevertheless it is what it is. Aside from a few people who managed to not get a chance to see it, no one was immune from blindness. The meteor shower has also managed to drop off a bunch of spores that grow into killer plants. The book has more detail on how the Triffids attacked the blind and helpless, but this was largely written out of the movie.Our hero, merchant seaman Bill Masen is able to see as he was in hospital for an eye operation and therefore he missed the meteor shower, along with acting classes and rehearsals it seems. He wakes the next morning to find that the hospital in in disarray and relatively empty and after coming across his blind doctor, he's made aware of what's happened. On venturing out into the streets of London he finds the streets scattered with people all stumbling about and falling over each other. If this wasn't a movie these scenes wouldn't be out of the ordinary for any normal London morning after the pubs and clubs have closed.Anyway our hero makes his way to the train station where a train is scheduled to come in and while some have agreed that the train crashing into the platform is a great scene once the blind passengers come stumbling from the carriages, however at the speed that this train arrives, it can only mean that even while blind, the driver stupidly kept feeding the engine lumps of wood or coal and didn't just come to a complete stop for safety reasons. The same can be said for the steamer still out at sea. Why continue to run if your crew is blind? It also implies that anyone who works in the boiler room or off duty crew who may have been asleep all left their posts or stayed awake to go and watch the meteors.This is just a very silly film that annoyingly strays too far from the book and in doing so stops making much sense. The couple in the lighthouse would have to be the most annoying as the woman did nothing except scream the whole time, or take abuse from her husband. In one of the biggest plot holes ever, there are Triffids swarming all over a small barren piece of rock,(not soil), that is constantly sprayed with sea water; the same sea water that just manages to kill them. No such event took place in the book.The acting and special effects are generally pretty poor, and this is yet another movie with a solid and interesting story that gets handled so badly when committed to film. This may be interesting for a late night movie or if there's just nothing better on, but it's not cinematic brilliance. It's annoying that this no longer has the same appeal to me as it used to, and I can look past the bad effects, but I can't overlook the amount of stupidity in this.