THE DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS (1963) ** A nurse helps an opthamology patient light his cigarette, and then takes it away from him. His nose and ears look funny sticking out from the bandages that serially circumnavigate his head. I don't know, seems like there should be more to say about a film in which nearly the entirety of the earth's population is blinded by comets, at which point the plot gives way to the attack of enormous mutant (and locomotive) plants. There's a very cool gypsy ice cream cart. Janette Scott puts an awful lot of passion into being frightened of the plants (pushing her eyeballs to extreme corners of their sockets, contorting her neck in a manner to impress a giraffe), which themselves resemble collapsing bad Rose Bowl Parade floats. Several scenes of the difficulties into which blind masses of humanity can get themselves are humorous in a manner that can't quite redeem itself, but it's all more self-deprecating than misanthropic.
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