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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.
score 8/10
paul2001sw-1 12 December 2014
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw3140297/ |
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8-9-2020 20:15:10