Good start, but then it gets ruined

This movie was so-so. It had it's moments, but wasn't the greatest.

It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

There's a more than satisfactory amount of boom-boom in the movie's trim running time.

After a worldwide meteor shower, giant plants attack and the majority of the population becomes blind. It's up to the survivors to ward off giant triffids in their fight of survival.Adapted from John Wyndham's book of the same name, this is a decent low budget post-apocalyptic movie that is rather enjoyable. The film is a British production directed by Steve Sekely. After filming the filmmakers realised that they only shot 57 minutes of usable footage. So, in order to extend the run time, they decided to add in an extra subplot involving a couple living at a lighthouse and this was directed by Freddie Francis. Francis ended up being an Oscar winning cinematographer known for Sons and Lovers, The Elephant Man, Glory and Cape Fear.The film stars Howard Keel who's best known for musicals and television, and he is decent in the lead role. The other actors also do well for what they are given and overall the acting is good for what is essentially a b-movie. The Day of the Triffids has gathered a cult following over the years and has inspired many films. It acts similarly to a zombie movie in that people are surrounded by what they perceive as an unstoppable threat and they eventually find a weakness. This was a few years ahead of the pioneering zombie films so the post-apocalyptic survival story was interesting at the time. While not necessarily smart, it's a fun creature feature that's worth a watch.

The screenplay of The Day of the Triffids was probably extremely interesting to read, and even through the cheesy finished product, I was able to recognize the original worth of Bernard Gordon and Philip Yordan's script. I don't know if Steve Sekely and Freddie Francis's directing made the film silly, or if the studio insisted on turning the movie into a cheap horror movie. It starts with an extremely similar premise to Little Shop of Horrors: While everyone watches a meteor shower, they're blinded, and man-eating Venus Flytraps try to take over the world. The few people who didn't watch the meteor shower can still see, but the vast majority of the population are blind and helpless. Imagine an airplane full of blind passengers, crew, and pilots-an extremely suspenseful scene featured in the film!Howard Keel and Janina Faye team up to save the human race, while Kieron Moore and Janette Scott also try to stay safe amidst the chaos. The worst parts of the movie are the horror bits. Women scream and extremely fake plants attack, and the audience rolls their eyes at the silliness. Had the scary scenes been cut out or handled with more drama and class, the movie probably would have been very good. As it is, if you liked the original Little Shop of Horrors from 1960, you might like this one. Despite the presence of musical king Howard Keel, there are no songs in this one. It's still pretty interesting though, so give it a shot if the premise appeals to you.

It was in colour! It looked fine for an older film, pretty soft but fine I guess. I didn't really like the music but other than that it was fine. I liked the idea of them going blind but the plants weren't that creepy. It lacked the old-school special effect that I was looking forward to!

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.