All you teenage mutant comet zombies!

I had all the intentions in the world of dropping some comments on “Night of the Comet” (1984) last Sunday. You know how it is sometimes. Time gets away from you, hours later, then days, then it is a week, and still nothing. It was sort of unplanned, too. I almost always plan ahead unlike what I used to do back as a lad, then when I was a teenager. Unlike a lot of films, such as “Silver Bullet” (1985) which I watched Saturday evening following “The Monster Squad” (1987), also intending to write my final comments for it, checking it off the 2020 list for final words on a film I’ve written about many, many times in the past on the blog, “Night of the Comet” was not a film I ever remember renting growing up. I do recall the hubbub the film received when it finally got a MGM release on DVD around 2007 or so, as the IMDb Horror Board had a lot of excitement. The availability of it and fresh attention drawn to it, I took a chance and blind bought “Night of the Comet”. I’m happy I did. While I don’t think it works as a zombie film, as a post apocalyptic 80s comedy, “Night of the Comet” does land successfully for me. The leads—Catherine Mary Stuart (“The Last Starfighter” / “Nightflyers”), Kelli Maroney (“Fast Times at Ridgemont High” / “Chopping Mall”), and Robert Beltran (“Star Trek: Voyager”)—are a significant factor in why I respond favorably to the film. Stuart is just a straight shooter, sort of curt, sarcastic, and trapped in a mediocre theater job (she prefers to play the arcade, sneak some popcorn, and fuck the projector operator), while Maroney is a cheerleader with little respect for her unfaithful stepmother (Sharon Farrell, in a small part at the beginning) and longing to land a boyfriend (she always feels Stuart is constantly a rival for the guys she likes, which really isn’t the case). Farrell punching Maroney in the face, knocking over furniture to the floor as the two exchange slaps over infidelity and the missing military husband/father is rather shocking in its parent to teenager abuse…Maroney’s response is pretty much the same as the audience, I assume. Director Thom Eberhardt (“Soul Survivor” / “The Night Before”) stole some empty street shots in LA when traffic was stopped up elsewhere and with the sky shaded with red filter gives the film a very surreal quality and atmosphere to it. Motorcycle and car rides in LA, clothes laid out with dust of where folks used to be before the comet came across the sky, burning up those looking right at it while those in metal enclosures luckily survived. Scientists holing up at a research facility are sick, realizing that they weren’t directly exposed but still suffered enough exposure that they are gradually turning into infected zombies. Geoffrey Lewis (frequent Eastwood collaborator) is the head scientist, while Mary Woronov is a staff member no longer of the belief that their blood tests and experiments to find a cure will be successful, later in the film (expected to kill Maroney but instead injecting herself). There is time spent by the sisters and Beltran at an abandoned radio station (the voice of the DJ is but recordings set up to run automatically), in LA, and sometimes separated (Maroney is left at the radio station while Stuart is carried to the facility; Maroney was at home while Stuart traveled by her boyfriend’s motorcycle to see if she was okay). There is a “Valley Girls go to the Mall and encounter hoods” sequence eventually interrupted before something really bad could happen while Beltran comes across a child zombie when realizing his mom was no longer among the living. There is the “escape from the lab” at the end as Beltran hopes to rescue Stuart from Lewis and the last scientists, who are deteriorating mentally and suffering eventual transition to zombies. I think why this is such a cult film is the use of the comet to alter life on the planet, provides a different reason for the zombie transformation for those who weren’t right under the comet’s effects as it passed by the earth, features LA in a statement of abandonment  (derelict and desolate), with the ups and downs of sisters (and the man they befriend along the way) trying to adjust to existence never to be the same again. Two kids Lewis and his team were hoping to use as guinea pigs for a cure eventually are “adopted” by Stuart and Beltran while Maroney finds her own high school teen beat model at the end of the film (driving up in a convertible). The sociopathic hoods in the mall wouldn’t last long on The Walking Dead and have a hard time with Stuart and Maroney, who had decided to raid this place to fulfill some materialistic desires…Woronov assumes Valley Girls would go there, telling Lewis as much. Stuart and Maroney have good chemistry as sisters in the film, with conversations about their missing father, boys, and the situation they face, some bickering and arguing (as sisters do), but ultimately always there for each other. Beltran is a bone of contention between them for a bit because Maroney wanted a crack at him despite being too young (at least that is how it was presented in the film), while it was clear Stuart would be the woman of the two he seemed better suited for. The early part of the film at the theater as the plans for the comet seemed to be treated as quite the spectacle shows and in the neighborhood where Maroney and Farrell lives featured all the community gathering outside in preparation. That next morning, as the city reveals its streets covered in victims’ clothes, the sky red, pops off screen. Great fun.