Entertaining in a b-movie horror kind of way, although not as lurid as the movie poster suggests, this is a very loose adaptation of John Wyndham’s classic 1951 novel. It’s barely the same story. The concept of both is that Bill Masen wakes up in hospital to discover that most of the population has been blinded by green flashes in the sky. At the same time, walking carnivorous plants called triffids are preying on the survivors.
Directed by Steve Sekely and Freddie Francis, written by Bernard Gordon and Philip Yordan, the film has so many plot holes that I’m not going to describe all of them. The best things about the film are its creepy music by Ron Goodwin, the recognisable London locations and amusingly horrible triffid props. I think the film is quite good until Bill leaves London for the Continent, where the plot goes downhill and there is an international feel at odds with the Britishness of the original story. Bill Masen is turned into a rather bland character, a Navy officer rather than a triffid expert. Susan, the girl he adopts, is conveniently a boarding school pupil with no family. Bill and Susan are upbeat considering that society is supposed to be crumbling. Miss Durrant, who is Bill’s romantic interest in the film (replacing the modern and sparky Josella), does not have much character either. Originally she is a very moral and stubborn leader who eventually succumbs to plague. The film does seem strangely prim and genteel, with little of the grit and realism of the book. No bad language, no warring tribes of survivors, no plague, no suggestions of polygamy to boost the population, no looting and everyone has immaculate hair, make-up and clothes.
One major difference is that the triffids, instead of being engineered and farmed, are aliens whose seeds arrived on meteors, neatly avoiding the Cold War paranoia of the book in which the ultimate blame lies with human scientific progress under the threat of nuclear war. The triffids in the film do not use their stingers much, preferring to use their arm-branches to grapple with people. They can even come back to life after being dismembered. The most ridiculous thing about the triffids, however, is the discovery, at the end, that they can be killed by sea-water. Hooray! The voiceover tells us, as we see smartly-dressed people going to church, that mankind survived. This is one of the worst endings to a film I’ve ever seen.
Every so often, the action cuts to a remote lighthouse inhabited by a scientist couple, Tom Goodwin (an alcoholic who studies stingrays) and his wife Karen. When a triffid terrorises them (somehow not perishing from the sea-water that surrounds the house) they get their specimen to study. Their only function in the story seems to be the addition of some romantic drama and their eventual discovery about how to kill the triffids, when Tom turns the hose on them.
Fans of the book are advised to check out the 1981 TV series for a more faithful adaptation.
