Night of the Comet | Film Review

FILM MOVIE REVIEW

Night of the Comet ***

by Jeremiah Kipp on March 14, 2007 Jump to Comments (0) or Add Your Own

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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?"

Director(s): Thom Eberhardt
Screenplay: Thom Eberhardt
Cast: Robert Beltran, Catherine Mary Stewart, Kelli Maroney, Sharon Farrell, Mary Woronov, Geoffrey Lewis
Distributor: Atlantic Releasing Corp.
Runtime: 95 min.
Rating: PG-13
Year: 1984