Review: Night of the Comet

This endearingly hokey low-budget B movie comes with a high nostalgia factor from the Reagan era.

Night of the Comet
Photo: Atlantic Releasing Corp.

This endearingly hokey low-budget B movie comes with a high nostalgia factor from the Reagan era: puffy hairstyles and clashing neon/shoulder pads fashion, ultra-lite Hall and Oates style rock ‘n’ roll (with a welcome Cyndi Lauper track tossed into the mix), and cheapo analog special effects. It aims low, giving a retread of clichés from 1950s end-of-the-world drive-in pictures and George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, but its peppy teenage characters and refined tongue-in-cheek sense of humor go a long way. A blazing comet transforms every living human into piles of red dust, leaving behind only a handful of survivors and cities teeming with flesh hungry zombies. Since the heroines of Night of the Comet are two valley girls, their immediate preoccupations are which one of them gets to “make it” with what might be the last surviving male in Los Angeles (hunky Robert Beltran) and, bored out of their minds when they aren’t blowing away creatures with UZI machine guns, flitting around the local shopping mall for new cheerleader outfits. Favorite set pieces include their clothing-store battle with some punk rocker zombies and Mary Woronov as a sexy scientist who gets to indulge in some deadpan flirting with her Eating Raoul co-star Beltran. As one character merrily quips to another: “Bitchin’, isn’t it?”

Score: 
 Cast: Robert Beltran, Catherine Mary Stewart, Kelli Maroney, Sharon Farrell, Mary Woronov, Geoffrey Lewis  Director: Thom Eberhardt  Screenwriter: Thom Eberhardt  Distributor: Atlantic Releasing Corp.  Running Time: 95 min  Rating: PG-13  Year: 1984  Buy: Video

Jeremiah Kipp

Jeremiah Kipp is a New York City based writer, producer and director with over ten years experience creating narrative and commercial films.

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