MartinHafer Last night I watched an episode of the old "Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea". In "The Price of Doom", you had a decent story and some very good actors...and a creature that looked like it cost $3.48 to make...at the most. Because the 'monster' was so ridiculously bad, it was hard to enjoy the show. It was so bad that famed sci-fi author Harlan Ellison disavowed responsibility for this episode and he asked his name be stricken from the show!!I mention all this because "Day of the Triffids" is pretty much the same experience as watching "The Price of Doom". It had a neat script, very good acting and monsters that were so laughably bad...even by 1960s standards. As a result it seriously took me out of the experience and made the film quite silly.In this near future film, meteorites strike the Earth and inexplicably make plants, triffids, turn into malevolent flesh- eating monsters. At the same time, most of the folks on the planet go blind...so it's up to a few to figure out how to survive and fight off the incredibly ridiculous creatures!Good script, good acting, dopey monsters...nuff said about this one.

Des Browning Utter, utter rubbish. Bears scant relationship to the excellent scifi novel it was based on. Amazed it got a few good reviews on here - John Wyndham must have been shocked at its poor treatment, cheap effects and complete departure from his book. Should be consigned to the dustbin of dreadful adaptations.

Robert J. Maxwell 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.

david-sarkies Maybe it is just that I am getting a little spoilt with the technology that goes into the production of movies these days, or maybe it is just that this film is based on a book and despite the special effects being worse than bad, the fact that it is based on a book and the book upon which it has been based is much better than the film itself probably adds to the fact that I did not particularly like this film all that much.Okay, to be blunt, it was really the special effects that were really bad with this film, but the thing is that back in 1962 they did not have computer imaging to enhance films, and it was still years away from the breakthroughs in special effects that give rise to films like 2001 A Space Odyssey and Star Wars so one can't really give this film flack over the poor special effects because what they had to work with at the time was limited indeed.As for the film itself, it is based on the John Wyndham book of the same name and it is about how a meteor shower one night results in everybody in the world going blind, with the exception of those who did not look onto it, and then from the chaos arises these plants known as Triffids, that go around eating what remains of humanity. The thing about the film though is that I believe that in the book we simply follow one person around, however in the film we are jumping back and forth between two groups, one guy and a woman in alight house (who some how managed to escape being blinded) and the sailor who had just had eye surgery, so had his eyes covered up during the meteor shower.However I guess an in-depth analysis of the film is meaningless because this film basically annoyed me. If it was supposed to be a horror film, then it failed badly, particularly since the triffids themselves looked so fake, and moved about as if they were on motorised wheels. On the other hand, it is never going to meet the standard of the book anyway.