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?”
Image/Sound
Just because Night of the Comet is an un-ambitious bit of retro schlock doesn’t mean we should let MGM off the hook for their crappy pass at color correction and their muddy transfer. The widescreen aspect ratio is preserved, for what it’s worth. Audio likewise feels cheap and tinny.
Extras
None, and it’s too bad because writer-director Thom Eberhardt might’ve been able to offer a useful gabfest about how they were able to get the city of Los Angeles to look so desolate-did they pull a 28 Days Later stunt getting them to shut down highways for five minutes at a time, and if so, how did they manage that on their miniscule budget? Also, maybe he could get into some pretentious social commentary about consumer culture. But we’ll never know, because MGM didn’t tack on any goodies for the fans, and this one has a surprising cult following!
Overall
A bare-bones DVD that feels slapped together; this corny little B-picture deserves at least the same treatment as similar goofball schlock horror flicks like Return of the Living Dead or the more recent Slither.
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