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The botanical dread might have its foundation in Corman's Little Shop of Horrors, exacerbated via mass blindness in a joke certainly appreciated by Saramago. A shower of meteorites lights up the London sky, though the key note early on is the irritation of the seafaring Yank (Howard Keel) missing the "once in a lifetime spectacle" due to bandaged eyes at the hospital. The following morning brings suddenly sightless citizens stumbling in the streets, airplanes crashing and trains plowing into stations, the officer takes to the ocean with the landscape burning behind him and across the pond finds a surrogate family (Nicole Maurey, Janina Faye). Adding to the apocalypse are the mutated flora of the title, lifting themselves out of the ground and slithering toward victims with eager jaws. Not Hawks' "intellectual carrot" (The Thing from Another World) but a comparable deadpan from Steve Sekely, with traces of The Naked Jungle in Philip Yordan's treatment. Freddie Francis handles the parallel narrative of marital renewal in an isolated lighthouse, where married scientists (Janette Scott, Kieron Moore) see their Albee playlet interrupted by stalking stalks and state the absurdist punchline of the Joseph Wyndham novel: "There's no sense in getting killed by a plant!" By all accounts a slapdash affair, still the central image of human fragility—a blind couple giving birth in an arid hacienda while an electric fence barely repulses the green army outside—is essential. The final revelation is from War of the Worlds, a stepping stone toward the vengeful-Nature thrillers of the next decade. (Shyamalan's The Happening is the update the new millennium deserves.) With Mervyn Johns, Carole Ann Ford, Ewan Roberts, and Alison Leggatt.
--- Fernando F. Croce |