This was a pretty good weekend for the number of movies I have watched but sadly not for the number of good movies I have seen.

Bird Box   based on a novel. is about a woman, Mallory, played by Sandra Bullock, and two children, Boy and Girl, taking a dangerous river trip while blindfolded in order to avoid seeing a supernatural force that drives people mad, usually into suicidal behavior or depending on plot requirements religious mania to spread the truth of what they have seen coupled with homicidal behavior. Bird Box  operates on the level of plot and really nothing more and even there is fails as it requires suspension of disbelief that I was unable to provide. A person unskilled and blindfolded cannot row a boat for days down a river without ending up on the bank, not to mention running fully blindfolded through heavy growth forest, or accurately wielding shotguns while opposed by multiple attackers. Each of the several characters that begin their siege as the apocalyptic disaster unfolds has a specific plot purpose and once they fill that purpose they die making for route and unimagined writing. Too patly constructed, lacking any characters of depth, and demanding far too much suspension of disbelief Bird Box  fails every test of effective horror.

No Blade of Grass,  also adapted from a novel, is another apocalyptic tale, this one focused on environmental destruction and the attending collapse of society. In the film a virus or blight is spreading around the world that destroys all member of the grass family, that includes, wheat, rice, corn, and other cereal grains, leading to mass starvation and anarchy as the governments of the world prove incapable of meeting the existential threat. The story focuses on the trails of the Custance family who, with advance warning of the government’s plan to seal off London, flee with a friend to the safety of a large potato farm owned by the father’s brother in the north of England. Along the way they surrender civilized norms in their fight for survival becoming hard brutal people until reaching their sanctuary and discovering that their plans are upended forcing them into even more immoral choices.

Released in 1970 No Blade of Grass,  which I first heard about from a fellow panelist as we discussed environmental disaster SF stories, is an ambitious but ultimately flawed production. Partly the film suffers from too much compression in both screen time and the passage of time for the characters. With a scant 136  96 minute, and wasting quite a few of those with set up and exposition, and with a fair number of characters, the movies doesn’t have the running time to build, explore, and transform these character in an meaningful method, leaving the viewer to watch a series of scenes that only nominally follow a sequence but lacking in emotional impact. Further more the character appear to travel for only a few days and in that short time they become murderous and hard, transformations that lack any clear baseline, we hardly get a chance to see who they were before the crisis, and as such reinforce the impression that these were evil people all along. No Blade of Grass  required a more epic format and without it the film falls far short of its intended goals.