There’s a crucial difference between the US TV mini series of The Shining and the Stanley Kubrick masterpiece and that is topiary.

Apparently impossible to film in 1980, the topiary animals in the grounds of the Overlook Hotel which stalked the unfortunate Torrance family were resurrected for the Stephen King approved mini series seventeen years later and it looked terrible, creating a tension vacuum into which also fell credibility and care.

The thing is that the topiary animals were great on the page, and whether Kubrick ever looked into incorporating them into his version I don’t know – what I do know is sometime King’s words are far more powerful when left on the page. So, with that in mind we come to this bit of news – there is a new version of John Wyndham’s classic 1951 novel The Day of the Triffids on its way to the big screen.

I can vaguely remember the 1981 BBC television adaptation which gripped a captive nation for its duration and tried very hard not to look silly. There was apparently a new version on TV recently with Dougray Scott but I’ve not seen it but producers Don Murphy and Michael Preger now have their eyes fixed firmly on a bigger canvas.

For they are the ones teaming up to bring Wyndham’s cosmic event/plant menace to cinemas in leaf flapping 3D! A worrying quote from the Variety piece read thus,

We are confident that with the new technological advances in 3D production, we have the tools with which to create Wyndham’s iconic vision of Armageddon.

Great.