The Day of the Triffids (1981)

Must See Movie...

Just perfect...

Great visuals, story delivers no surprises

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

This early 1980s adaptation of John Wyndham's 'Day of the Triffids' offers us global apocalypse on a shoestring budget: cue some decidedly unspectacular special effects and thin crowd scenes. The acting is also limited: the characters respond remarkably calmly to the near-end of everything. Yet the triffids themselves are surprisingly well done, with their venomous strings and menacing roots. And (especially knowing what was to come) I found the tension implicit in the opening episode, in which a temporarily blinded man comes to suspect that something in the world he can't see isn't what it's supposed to be, utterly unbearable. At the end of the day, a good story trumps special effects, and there's something in the believable human tragedy of this one that makes it more horrifying than any horror story. Indeed, some of the scenes had stayed with me since first watching it over thirty years before. It's proof you don't need exploding galaxies or evil geniuses to unsettle a complacent audience.

This series, being a rip-off from the 1962 movie with the same catchy title, made interesting viewing because it's very hard to determine whether it was made with a tongue-in-cheek attitude or not. The plot is obviously completely crazy - it contains the perplexing phenomena of 99% of the population going blind in the glow of a meteor shower and disregards the fact that roughly half the population has daylight. The glow also causes a vicious breed of plants called triffids to go berserk and in doing so they have the poor blind people for snacks. This of course leads to a number of chases and a survival story which rates among the most arbitrary in the history of movie or television fiction. So if you like to keep your viewing on a serious or artistic level don't watch this one. However, if you can digest a bit of kitch together with perhaps a trifle mediocre acting, you will find it entertaining.

I had vivid memories of watching this show as a teenager when it was first shown on TV, and recently bought the DVD. It's not badly done, but at the same time I found it far less effective today than I did then. Surprisingly, the triffid effects didn't look too bad. OK, they're obviously fake plants, but they're about as convincing as could be expected on a BBC budget.I think the main problem is that they tried to cram too much into a relatively short series, so the character development isn't terribly convincing. As some others have pointed out, a number of scenes are basically pure exposition with characters expounding their beliefs without much dramatic impact, characters meet and fall in love in a few minutes, and the whole 'should we help the blind or not?' issue is really skimmed over with people making up their minds very quickly: I know it would make rational sense to let most of the blind die rather than try to keep them alive, but I doubt that most people would write them off as quickly as the characters here do. Another issue watching it in the 21st century is that there are a few very 1970s haircuts that rather give away the age of the show :).So it's worth a look, and it's a far better adaption of the book than the film from the 1960s, but there's still room for a better one!

In my memory it was a good series... Twenty years later I saw the day of the triffids tv adaptation again and i must say that it was a disappointment...... it looked a filmstudent project ;-) I like the idea and story so I hope that someday a new version will be made.