NIGHT OF THE COMET (1984)

 

DIRECTED & WRITTEN by Thom Eberhardt

STARRING - Catherine Mary Stewart as Regina "Reggie" Belmont

Kelli Maroney as Samantha "Sam" Belmont

Robert Beltran as Hector Gomez

Sharon Farrell as Doris, Reggie and Sam's stepmother.

Mary Woronov as Audrey White

Geoffrey Lewis as Dr. Carter

Peter Fox as Dr. Wilson

John Achorn as Oscar Silverman

Michael Bowen as Larry Dupree

Devon Ericson as Minder

Lissa Layng as Davenport

Janice Kawaye as Sarah

Chance Boyer as Brian

Ivan E. Roth as Willy

Dick Rude and Chris Pedersen as Stockboys

Marc Poppel as Danny Mason Keener / DMK

Stanley Brock as Mel

PLOT - In the year 1984, several days before Christmas, Planet Earth's orbit intersects with the tail of a comet.

The results are disastrous.

Cosmic radiation carried by the comet's tail floods the world. Those unlucky enough to be fully exposed to it are instantly disintegrated. Those partially exposed become savage zombie-like mutants. Only those who where shielded by being in fully metal surroundings at the time of the comet's arrival survive unscathed.

Two such survivors are teenage sisters - Regina and Samantha.

The two girls set out to look for fellow survivors in the now deserted city of Los Angeles, soon they team up with another survivor - a truck driver named Hector, but there are other survivors also out there - including a sinister bunch of scientists who have located the intrepid group and are now coming for them.

Can the girls and Hector survive attacks from the mutants and stay free from becoming the government scientist's latest guinea pigs ?...

PERFORMANCES - As we'll see later the two main performances in this film - Catherine Mary Stewart as Regina and Kelli Maroney as her younger sister Sam - would prove to be quite influential to pop culture in future years, but first let's look at the characters themselves...

Regina is the eldest sister of the two - she works in a local cinema, loves getting high scores on arcade games and generally takes no shit from anybody.

Sam is the younger sister - she's cute, slightly naive, is obsessed with boys and also takes no shit from anybody.

It's this take no shit attitude which comes to define the girls throughout the movie. When we first meet them we learn that they've both been saddled with a bitchy, hate filled domineering step mother looking after them whilst their dad's away on business. They both clash heavily with her but not to worry because here comes a comet which thoughtfully reduces said wicked step mother to a pile of red dust... unfortunately it also reduces the rest of the planet's population to red dust as well.

Luckily the girls where both housed inside metal containers when the comet arrived - Regina in a projection room at work and Sam spent the night sleeping in a metal bin after slapping her step mother in the face.

It's not long before the girls tool up with some handily discarded firearms and very soon they're striding the deserted streets of L.A. kicking mutant zombie arse.

So what we have here are Valley girls with attitude and guns - they're both crackshots and woe betide any mutants that get in thier way. Both leads are excellent - Stewart as Regina is the more sarcastic and physically imposing of the two, whilst Moroney as Sam is sweetly cocky and absolutely adorable. I said earlier that these two characters proved influential and they where - a certain Joss Whedon was inspired by them to create the character of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, with that in mind when watching this movie you can certainly see the similarities.

For the male lead we get Robert Beltran as Hector - a truck driver who the girls meet on their journey who ultimately becomes Regina's new boyfriend. Beltran (better known for his appearances in Star Trek Voyager as Chakotay) is also a good fit for his role, but he's nowhere near as memorable as the two female leads and gets nowhere near as much to do.

In supporting roles we have Mary Woronov as Audrey White and Geoffrey Lewis as Dr Carter - two of the scientists looking to cure/reverse the effects of the zombie mutation. Lewis plays Dr. Carter as a cold pragmatist - he's not adverse to sacrificing children to find a cure, whilst Woronov plays Audrey as jaded and sickened by what she's forced to do - she at least gets some redemption by the film's end, Carter isn't so lucky.

SEX & VIOLENCE - It's heavily implied that Regina has sex with her boyfriend whilst she's in the projection booth of the cinema - but nothing is shown.

For violence - once again we see 90 percent of humanity being wiped out by the very 80's neon psychedelic comet apocalypse.

All that's left of most of the human race afterwards is piles of orange dust scattered amidst the victim's clothes...

One particularly grisly thought about the dust that's occured to me (even though it's not explicitly stated on screen) is this - the red sky caused by the comet's aftermath is (presumably) caused by the red dust being literally everywhere.

At the end of the film theres a massive rainstorm and the dust is seen to be washed away by it, after that the sky is back to normal again. So my thoughts drift to the fact that if the red dust was in the air then that means throughout the movie EVERY character is LITERALLY breathing into their lungs the calcified remains of dead human beings (probably thier friends and family members), that's DARK !!!!

Apart from that we get several zombie attacks - but don't be expecting anything on a Romero level as you'll be sorely disappointed - in fact we only see about seven zombies in the entire movie (and two of them are in a dream sequence), some bloke does get his head stoved in with an industrial spanner though. 

Oh, and there's a kick arse gun fight in a shopping mall at the midpoint of the film which is probably the stand out moment of the entire movie.

SFX - Some very 80's neon visuals for the meteor storm and the resulting dust clogged atmosphere - in fact the whole movie has a very 80's neon sheen to it.

Naturally this being post Dawn of The Dead era we get some pretty cool looking zombies (just a shame there wasn't more of them)...

RATING - A very odd little film this one - I like it, I like it a lot...but there's something missing. 

The acting and script is all of a decent standard for a B-movie, the premise is a bit more original than the usual nuclear holocaust that we got all the time back then (even though it was ripped off from Day Of The Triffids), the main characters are iconic in their own way and the script fairly crackles with sparky dialogue.

BUT... there's the lack of zombies to consider - they're built up to be this big menace and yet we only see a handful of them. I feel the last act of the film is where this becomes problematic when Sam and Hector set out to bust Regina free from the evil scientist's silo. Basically they break in, bust Regina out with little trouble and then just drive off. Wouldn't it have been great if we'd have had a legion of zombies outside the gates and our heroes had let them in to finish off the scientists ? Instead, the climax just feels a bit flat - I think they must have blown all thier budget on the gunfight in the shopping mall halfway through the film and just had to cobble together a quick ending and hoped nobody would notice.

There's also a bit of a pacing problem - parts of the film are very slow moving and the story does lag in places as a result.

For all that though Night Of The Comet is still a fine slice of 80's cult cinema. 4 piles of human dust remains out of 5.

ART -