With no money to speak of...(possibly an even lower budget than MGM's 1960 version of Wyndham's "Village Of The Damned").....they took on a movie that opens with a spectacular meteor shower that blinds most of the world's population.......and leads to apocalyptic city-consuming fires, violent panic among the stricken blinded populace, plane crashes, train crashes......and an ever growing infestation of ambulatory, 8 foot tall carnivorous plants armed with whip-like stingers and an insatiable taste for human flesh.......
And the Triffids, as they're called, may only be plants, but they're smart enough to figure out that the blind humans staggering around are easy pickins'......an all-you-can-eat buffet.....a meat bar where the salad does all the eating.....
Quite a challenge, considering they had enough of a budget to make a "Carry On" movie. But try they do......and despite the primitive, barely passable special effects, the movie exudes an immediate, unnerving dramatic power, even amid the sloppiness of its production. (Composer Ron Goodwin gets things off to a fine start with a main title theme punctuated with the dread-filled wail of the horn section...)
In the great tradition of unlikely American movie stars who wander into low-budget, overseas sci-fi/horror, that big ole MGM musical baritone Howard Keel assumes hero duties here. Personally, when Keel was surrounded by Triffids, we would have had him break into "My Defenses Are Down" from 'Annie Get Your Gun'.......but that's just us.......
Speaking of the low budget again......money, or the lack of it, reared its ugly head when the film barely had an hour's worth of footage in the can. After a year's shutdown, the enterprising production re-assembled to a shoot a half hour worth's of a husband and wife scientist team stuck in lighthouse overrun with Triffids.
Even though the inventive Triffs figure out a way to climb up the lighthouse spiral staircase, our plucky couple stumble upon the plants' Achilles Heel.....or stalk...or leaf...or whatever...
And so "The Day Of The Triffids" finally slapped together enough sequences to call itself a feature length movie.....and as rickety constructed as it is, it makes for a thoroughly entertaining time for all classic sci-fi movie buffs. For the BQ, it's always worth a fun re-viewing.
So we'll go green this Halloween with 4 stars (****) for our favorite voracious veggies.......a shame their filmography includes only this movie and their surprise cameo appearance inside E.T,'s spaceship.......come on, Hollywood, why not
plant these plants in a new movie.....
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