Overlooked Movies: Day of the Triffids

Howard Keel in a horror movie?  Yes, the lead in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (and a number of other musicals) made movies with no music at all, including a few westerns and this one, which is based on a novel by John Wyndham.  I'd read the novel a few years before the movie appeared, so I remembered enough about it to know that there are some significant differences between the two, most notably the ending.  But I'll get to that later.

In the movie, the triffids are a plant that's been brought to earth by a meteor shower. They're sinister, they make a funny noise, and they kill.  Keel is in the hospital recovering from an eye injury caused by a triffid when second meteor shower comes along and blinds everyone who looks at it.  Most people on earth look at it, and with most of the population now blind, civilization starts to crumble.  Keel and a few others who can see begin to make their way to Spain (I'm not quite sure why) and have to evade the triffids all the way.  A second plot involves a young couple in a lighthouse, trying to survive.

There are some good scenes of civilization crumbling and of narrow escapes from the triffids, who are having a fine time feeding on a bunch of blind people who can't escape them.  Who will save the world from these horrible creatures?  [HUGE SPOILER ALERT It turns out that they can be easily killed.  It's not quite a rip-off of War of the Worlds, but it's in the same ballpark.  The young couple in the lighthouse figure it out.  In the novel, there's no such happy ending.  There's some hope that humanity will survive, but no easy way of killing triffids. END OF HUGE SPOILER ALERT]   

This isn't a great movie, by any means.  It's not terrible, though, and might be fun if you're in the right frame of mind.

Overlooked Movies: Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman

I could write about the bad SF movies of the '50s every week here because I saw most of them.  Including this one.  What's my excuse?  Well, I was a teenager, and it's about a very attractive 50 ft. woman wrapped in bed sheets. Need I say more?  Okay, I will say more.  This is the kind of thing that was often shown on the weekends at the Mexia Theatre, and everybody went to the movies on Saturday night. 

How bad is Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman?  Just watch the trailer below and you'll have a pretty good idea.  You'll also have seen most of the movie.  Sadly the great scene in the poster to the left doesn't appear in the movie.  If it did, the movie would be a lot better.  As it is, the special effects are terrible, the acting isn't much better, and the story is goofy.  There are continuity errors to match anything in an Ed Wood movie. 

But what does any of that matter?  It's about a 50 ft. woman!  Wrapped in bed sheets!  This time it's not an atomic accident that creates her.  I'm not sure what does.  She meets a giant in a flying saucer, he steals her diamond ring, and she gets really big.  This is bad news for her philandering husband, and you guys should take note of what happens to him and his blonde hottie.  There's definitely a moral to the story, as there often was in this kind of movie back then.

Some of you might be wondering if I knew this movie was bad when I saw it.  Sure I did.  But did I care?  Nope.  It was fun to be a kid and go to the movies, no matter how bad they were, and there was always something to like in even the worst of them.  Did I mention the 50 ft. woman wrapped in bed sheets?  

Did we laugh at how bad some of the movies were?  Yep, we did that, too, and after the movie we'd go to the Dairy Queen or the Dairy King or maybe drive out to the lake and dance to music on the jukebox.  I miss the old days.