The novel The Day of the Triffids is a perennial favorite filmed only twice but forever being resurrected in spirit in post-apocalyptic movies. The original story makes sense in ways that the monster-oriented Steve Sekely film does not. Wyndham's Triffids are already a daily reality before the meteorite shower that blinds most of the world; they are raised in controlled farms where their poisoned whips are carefully trimmed so that a fine oil useful in industry can be harvested. Bill Masen is a worker on one of these farms. Through an accident with an improperly docked (trimmed) Triffid he gets a mist of poison in his eyes. Bill's hospital stay makes him one of the fortunate people still able to see.

The book concentrates heavily on communal efforts to survive after the collapse of mankind, with the Triffids as a side threat that becomes untenable as they increase in number. With a female companion named Josella, Masen joins up with a couple of restrictive groups dedicated to caring for blind people; he finds their rigid rules difficult to take but cooperates. He then falls prey to another group that forces sighted people to help a certain number of the sightless to live by foraging for canned food. He escapes from that group and eventually seeks shelter on the farm of a relative. Survival there is possible until masses of Triffids lay siege to the farm house and armed representatives of yet another warlord arrive to force Bill and Josella to take in dozens of dependents.

Barely mentioned is the origin of the Triffids, which Bill reveals near the end of the book. They were developed through genetic experiments in a lab, originally as a source of a fine oil for perfume. Spies stole a quantity of Triffid spores and were smuggling them by jet plane. The plane was shot down by competitors, releasing the spores into the stratosphere. The Triffids blanketed the Earth.

The film flattens out the Triffid concept into an obvious monster movie. The meteors that blind also carry the Triffid spores, which appear to grow to maturity overnight. It plays as an extremely hokey coincidence, a convenient way of making the pesky Triffids into a deadly menace. In a world suddenly gone blind, almost anything could be a deadly menace - wild dogs ... anything.

The film script slowly reveals a world destroyed in a single night. Bill's eye surgeon kills himself upon realizing what has happened. Bill cannot help the people he finds staggering in the street. Trains run out of control and ships are left unguided. Unable to land, planes crash after they run out of fuel. All of this is rather literally depicted. With London in flames, Bill and his new friend Susan leave by boat to answer radio news of a conference in France.

The monsters aren't used very well. A Triffid in a greenhouse kills a night watchman and Bill sees one on the street. An encounter on a foggy country road is the best, simply for atmospherics - the hazier these monsters are, the better. Triffids come into play in France and later in Spain, massing by the dozens in the woods near Miss Durant's chateau and finally marching by the thousands against an electrified fence.

Somewhere in France, the production budget and script of The Day of the Triffids give out at roughly the same time. The book's ideas about groups competing in the post-disaster world are ignored. The invading soldiers are reinvented as freed French prisoners. The convicts invade Durant's school and force the women to sing, dance and drink with them, an elaborate but poorly-staged sequence. The story then shrinks in scale to just Bill, Susan and Miss Durant, who become a ready-made new family. Blind Bettina (Carol Ann Ford) tries to entice Bill into staying and helping at Durant's school, a gesture reminiscent of one group of scavengers in the book that tries to buy Bill's loyalty with a harem of willing, blind sex partners. A Triffid attack ruins any ideas Bill might have about becoming a Triffid-hunting Hugh Hefner.

Although it's rarely admitted, post-apocalyptic stories like The Day of the Triffids offer their audience an egocentric morbid fantasy based on survival. With few people left functioning and the law dissolved, we get to imagine ourselves as one of the lucky 'winners' given a chance to survive and prevail in a world operating under new rules. We can apply our own ruthless imaginations to the specific problems confronting the hero.

The movie's Triffids are never completely believable either standing still or in motion, and they never look as ferocious as the famous Ad Art (seen below, in yellow). Prop Triffids pulled by wires are exactly what they look like, clunky rubber mannikins that couldn't negotiate a step and never really seem alive. Their stalks are almost always tied together on top, probably because they'd fall apart otherwise. We see a stinger-whip in motion only once, and not too clearly. A couple of long shots use a model Triffid that moves far too smoothly. Later in the film we can tell that the walking plants are men in ill-fitting suits, shuffling along trying to look alive. Some angles are cut very short, but we can still see human legs stepping at the bottom of shots. If ever there was a movie concept that needed Computer Generated Imagery, The Day of the Triffids is probably it.

The fact is that Wyndham's Triffids are a tough sell. The book's description doesn't make an individual plant sound particularly threatening. It's just a round bole at the bottom with three leaf-like feet that shuffle along like a one-legged man on crutches. The six or eight-foot stalk above just waves about wildly as the thing jerks forward. Triffids find something warm, sting it, and then sit on it 'til it rots, like fungus. They communicate by rattling dry, twig-like appendages. The movie at least gets that part right by providing a creepy sound effect.

The last section of the film is very bitty. Wally Veevers' special effects become desperate, with grainy mattes and smoke that disappears behind matte lines. The script simply goes away, leaving Keel and Maurey to exchange bare expository lines. Keel was quoted more than once as saying that the production just fell apart, and he had to make up his own dialogue. A married Spaniard couple with terrible accents are glad to see the foreigners arrive to help deliver their baby. Expensive-looking but poorly filmed sets don't mesh well with real locations.

Apparently the script was so badly trimmed, when an assembly was made it was scarcely an hour long and lacked a conclusion - the little group simply gets picked up by a French submarine and is taken who-knows-where. Bernard Gordon explained that after a production hiatus, a second unit under director Freddie Francis was hired to put together new material, which accounts for a completely separate plotline taking place at a remote lighthouse besieged by the Triffids. Husband and wife acting team Kieron Moore and Janette Scott fret and struggle to keep the monsters out, a process broken up into sections and intercut with the rather boring progress of Keel, Maurey and Faye. To provide a conventionally dramatic ending, Moore discovers at the last moment possible that sea water dissolves the Triffids into green soup. This hackneyed gag is treated as a "God saves humanity" scientific breakthrough. The solution makes no sense whatsoever - the Triffid monsters attacking the lighthouse matured on the rocks outside, which are constantly being soaked in sea spray.

Back around 1990 Image released a letterboxed laserdisc, which I believe cost $50. Its quality was just okay but the disc finally let us see what the picture looked like in CinemaScope. Savant edited a version of the movie that omitted the entire added lighthouse subplot and bypassed the pitiful "jump off a rock, get picked up by a rowboat" ending. I just made a short montage of the massed Triffids surrounding the Spanish hacienda, and repeated their clicking sounds to indicate that they weren't going away. Thus, my bogus cut of The Day of the Triffids now ended like The Birds.

On a scale of Excellent, Good, Fair, and Poor,
The Day of the Triffids (Cheezy Flicks disc 02-005) rates:
Movie: Fair + but fascinating to monster fans
Video: Poor but it is letterboxed
Sound: Fair
Supplements: trailer, other trailers, concession-type theater announcements
Packaging: Keep case
Reviewed: October 29, 2005