Sure, I could have spent my Sunday going to another movie, but I had a lot to do. I did record a podcast yesterday, and editing takes time. I figured I’d just stay home and do some stuff around the apartment, so that meant going for streaming a movie. Why not go for something older?
As such, here’s a review for a sci-fi horror movie from 1962, The Day of the Triffids. Based on a novel by John Wyndham, this is no American cheesy sci-fi movie. This is an English cheesy sci-fi movie. There is a difference.
A strange meteor shower flashes by the Earth one night, leaving anyone who looked at it blind the next day. A handful of people seem to be OK, and the movie follows around a few of them. There’s merchant navy officer Bill Masen (Howard Keel), who had his eyes bandaged following surgery, and his ever-growing group of survivors. Then there’s Tom and Karen Goodwin (Kieron Moore and Janette Scott), a married couple doing scientific research on a remote lighthouse, initially having problems due to Tom’s alcohol-induced depression.
The blindness would be bad enough, but plants known as a triffids, originally from meteors themselves, suddenly grow, learn to walk, appear intelligent, and take to eating any animal or human they can take down with a toxic barb.
So, bottom line, in many ways this was a very standard sci-fi horror movie. Female characters often seem to exist simply to scream their heads off, the plants seem nearly unstoppable until they aren’t, and most of the characters are rather bland heroic types. Tom Goodwin actually has a character arc, but the rest are more or less the same people at the end of the movie they appeared to be in the beginning. And the only actor I recognized was original Doctor Who companion Carol Ann Ford as a blind French girl, and that’s it. Then again, none of the actors’ performances really leapt out to me anyway. Some were about as bland as an actor can give without being outright awful. They’re just there.
That said, the movie does a good job of thinking out what nearly universal world-wide blindness would do, who would likely be spared of such a fate, and setting up rules for how the triffids hunt and kill. As for the triffids themselves, given the limits of early 60s special effects, they actually look pretty good. Sure, they’re made of rubber, but the movements work for the most part, and they do look sufficiently alien for what are essentially killer beanstalks.
Maybe it’s because I just have a fondness for cheesy sci-fi, but I did dig this movie, and it wasn’t really all that cheesy when all was said and done. Probably better than, say, Seberg, which would have been what I saw today if I’d gone out to the multiplex. Maybe next time.
Grade: B-
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