It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

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...

Man eating ficuses. Cinematic gold of the purest kind, that stuff writes and directs itself. Just picture the flesh hungry potted darlings just breaking free from their lives as aesthetically pleasing wastes of space and turning on their unassuming former masters. Chaos breaks out as a fern decides to head-butt a random jogger, or an almond tree starts lunching its fruits as a fusillade of delicious death. Who wouldn't want to watch this display of nutty aggression? Director Steven Sekely stepped up to the challenge of directing a movie about the Day the Arboretum Walked, and found himself not exactly up to the challenge. Day of the Triffids is based on the novel of the same name by John Wyndham. The book takes place during an apocalypse scenario in which the titular Triffids might not be the biggest threat, and it deals with the effects of social disintegration in an exhaustive and complex way. Sekely's version on the other hand is only a stunted version of the original as it only retains basic plot beats and characters. The story goes – a massive meteor shower has left the vast majority of planet's population blinded. We follow Bill Masen (Howard Keel), an eye- surgery patient whose eyes were covered up due to an injury during the incident, and thus remained unaffected by the blinding flash. With his eyesight slowly returning he ventures outside the London hospital he was treated in, only to find that the fabric of society has slowly started to unravel. Blind people stumble around the streets, searching for the few lucky ones with functioning eyesight to lead them. In this weakened state, humans are perfect prey for a unique type of planet called a Triffid. These are plants capable of locomotion, are taller than a person, and carry a distinct flavor for flesh. They arrived on planet Earth on a meteorite some time before the flash, so perhaps they could be categorised as aliens as well? In any case, they were relatively docile before the flash, but became intensely aggressive and hungry for humans afterwards. Another plot starts at this point as well, a pair of scientists , Tom (Kieron Moore) and Karen (Janette Scott) attempt to understand the Triffids and find a way to destroy them. In short, the movie criss-crosses between the two story lines – Masen's journey from London to France, and finally Spain, and the scientist's race against time to find the cure and repel the onslaught of Triffids in front of their doors. Along the way, he rescues Susan (Janina Faye) , a girl with her eyesight intact, and together they have to find a way to survive their predicament. Others join and leave this party throughout the movie, making Masen a kind of protector against Triffids and malicious humans as well.With that, you can visualise some of the basic themes the movie deals with. Class-ism, political structures, family, sacrifice and environmentalism are the salient driving force. A degree of nihilism towards the pillars of society pervades the movie, and a return to a so-called natural law is interred. This primitive interpretation of the way contemporary society stands against anarchy is delved deeper in the book, but is kept fairly simplistic in the movie. The book implies inter-dependency between all people, while the movie postulates that only the clean, chosen protagonists are the only one worth caring about. In general, this movie deals with its apocalyptic motifs in a quite literally biblical fashion. The way the two main stories are intertwined provide some of the movies egregious errors. While Masen's scramble to keep himself and his friends alive provides the brunt of the story-line, the secondary story-line with the scientists provides a poor contrast and fails to add anything relevant to the story, save delivering a few lines of exposition and an ultimately unrewarding and simplistic ending. Overall, the story lacks both direction and focus, a lot of time is lost on establishing locations and set-pieces, while the drama is usually relegated to uninspired dialogue or drab tension scenes. Like Night of the Lepus and its carnivorous coneys, Day of the Triffids has the unenviable task of making non-threatening entities seem like monstrous ghouls. This endeavour does not end extremely well. The Triffids themselves are these gigantic asparaguses topped with a flower head that move daintily along a rail and slowly lumber towards the camera. The effect is less than frightening. They look like the dope smoking vine monster from Scary Movie 2, the one that rolls up Shorty. To emphasise their appearance, they are usually introduced with a scream, and this technique becomes obvious and grating as the movie progresses. On a more positive note, some of the matte paintings and environmental special effects aren't completely terrible, and have that seventies psychedelic style. These don't save the movie, but remain one of the more satisfying parts of the experience. The acting is par for the course, politically and environmentally minded horrors and thrillers were par for the course during the sixties and seventies, and Day of the Triffids shows that actors were well aware of what is expected of their delivery. Also worth mentioning is the way the blind are portrayed veers far to easily into parody territory. Some of the establishing shots where the blind roam around the landscape seem like something taken from the Three Stooges.To finish, Day of the Triffids does depressingly little both with its loaded story-line and its absurd premise. Despite a few laughable special effects, the whole endeavour feels tepid and uninspired. That said, the book the movies is based on has become more relevant with the popularity of zombie epidemic and apocalypse media, so check it out and you just might find something of note from this wacky idea.

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 saw this piece of mindless junk when it came out and enjoyed it immensely. It borrows heavily from "War of the Worlds," "Invasion of the Body Snatchers," and maybe "The Little Shop of Horrors." And it follows a pattern familiar to any fan of inexpensive science fiction stories.First, there must be a scientist around to help discover the best way to destroy the illegal aliens. In this case, that would be Kieron Moore. The scientist usually has a pretty assistant. Right. Janette Scott, who really IS attractive.There has to be a jack of all trades, too; somebody to keep the generators running, who knows how to fix a flat tire and run a boat, who is handy with radios and carpentry. Howard Keel knows all that stuff. He gets most of the screen time because the scientist, due to clumsy plotting, is stuck away on an isolated lighthouse off the Cornish coast. A GOOD lousy cheap science fiction movie would have put the scientist and the hero together in the same frame, with the scientist providing the advice and the hero providing the action.The hero should pick up a girl friend along the way. Early on, Howard Keel picks up Janina Faye as a companion but since she's only twelve years old, that won't do. This is "The Day of the Triffids," not "Lolita." So Keel and Janina travel to France, where Keel is able to consort with Nicole Maurey, although little develops between them, and frankly I'd prefer Joan Weldon as an affiliate because she was a singer with the San Francisco Opera and because she looked just swell in an Army helmet as the scientist's niece in "Them!" Believe me, there is no turn on like a woman in battle dress. Another part of any good rotten cheap story of alien invasions or monsters from the bowels of the earth, if they're British, as this one is, is that they feature some familiar American face, usually an over-the-hill star. In this instance, it's the baritone profundo Howard Keel but elsewhere it's Brian Donlevy, Gene Evans, Richard Carlson, Forrest Tucker, or even, improbably, Sonny Tufts who, by the 1950s, must have had only the hint of a liver left.The story? These man-eating plants are somehow activated by a meteor shower that turns everyone blind except those who, like Keel, were unable or unwilling to watch it. The shabby looking things are crawling all over the planet eating people. They're attracted to noise, perhaps because they themselves can only produce a staccato clucking sound like that of a pair of dice being shaken in a cardboard container. How does the scientist figure out a way of destroying them? No power on earth could drag the answer out of me but if you've read H. G. Well's "War of the Worlds" you know it's not going to turn out to be a ray gun. Final scene: Crowds climbing the steps to a church while chimes of triumph ring on the sound track. The originality is stunning.