The Day of the Triffids

I've stated quite a few times that I don't do the Blind Spot series, mostly because I don't know that far in advance what movies I'm going to be watching over the course of a year and as such don't want to commit myself to watching certain movies. But one of those movies with a bit of a cult following that I'd never seen before was The Day of the Triffids. I recently found that it's airing on one of the streaming TV services (I think I watched it on Tubi), so I decided to watch it in order to finally be able to do a review here.

Howard Keel is the nominal star, playing Bill Masen, an American merchant marine in London. He's had some sort of accident that required having surgery on his eyes, so as the movie opens he's in hospital with his eyes bandaged, waiting for his bandages to be removed the next morning. Meanwhile, the radio is reporting that there's a spectacular meteor shower that can be seen all around the world, so Bill wants to take his bandages off early to see the meteors, but the doctor says no.

It's a good thing that the doctor says no, because the next morning Bill wakes up to find that the medical staff that was supposed to remove the bandages is not there, which of course doesn't make sense to Bill. The surgeon shows up, informing Bill that he (the surgion) has suddenly gone quite blind, and Bill, actually being able to see once the bandages are removed, is going to have to help the doctors for a bit. But what's worse for Bill is how the doctor went blind.

Apparently, everyone who watched the meteor shower went blind, which is a pretty darn big plot hole, because the movie expects us to believe that something on the order of 99% of the population is now blind. You'd think that either a lot more people would have been in a position not to see the meteor shower or slept through it. Alternatively, you'd think that reports of blindness would have come in from one time zone first, much like if the Y2K bug had been a real thing. But no; somehow almost everybody went blind.

And if that's not bad enough, these meteors were not really meteors, but some sort of extraterrestrial thing that also sent spores to earth. These spores very quickly grow into something called triffids, a plant-like organism that has the power to move (since it's extraterrestrial, I don't think a motile plant should be considered another plot hole) and is poisonous. Bill has to escape the poisonous plants while trying to find other people who for whatever reason didn't get blinded by the meteors.

Meanwhile, in a completely unrelated plot, Tom and Karen Goodwin (Kieron Moore and Janette Scott respectively) are a pair of scientists doing research at an isolated lighthouse, presumably there to save their marriage since Tom has a passion for the bottle and being at a lighthouse is a way to keep more booze from being brought in. They were so busy with their research that they didn't watch the meteors and didn't go blind. But they're more or less alone, and somehow even their tiny little island got some triffid spores, which seems like a plot hole too once the ending is revealed.

The idea behind The Day of the Triffids is interesting, although apparently this movie is changed quite a bit from the original early 1950s novel on which it's based. Having read a synopsis of the novel, a lot of what's going on makes more sense. The movie is entertaining enough, and not terribly frightening, but it is a bit of a mess. (Apparently, money problems resulted in the two completely disjoint plot lines. It's also why the movie has two directors.) If you haven't seen it before, you should probably watch it once just to see what it's all about.