Night of the Comet (1984)
A comet comes close by but doesn’t make an impact
When a comet passes close to Earth things quickly go sideways for two valley girls, but does Night of the Comet hit or miss the mark?
Let’s start with an interesting scenario for you.
You find out that a comet is going to pass pretty darn close to earth. It’s a once in a lifetime chance to get a front row seat to a celestial phenomenon unseen since the extinction of the dinosaurs so you decide to throw a street party.
The first question is where do you hold the party? At home? A friend’s house? at work? How about outside a cinema in town? I’m pretty sure that the last one would be quite far down the list.
Secondly, considering this comet last came to earth at the time of the extinction of the dinosaurs, would you be concerned? Apparently not seems to be the answer for as soon as the comet arrives, everyone dissolves into a pile of turmeric coloured powder right where they were standing. But of course, not everyone is killed out-right otherwise we wouldn’t have a movie to watch.
Somehow, a few have been turned into, and we use the word very loosely here, zombies. Against this backdrop two sisters from the valley have been unaffected and soon believe they are the only survivors of this tragedy due to a fortunate coincidence that saw them both sleep in metal lined rooms, not the same room mind – that would be crazy.
The older of the two siblings, Regina, (played by Catherine Mary Stewart – famed for The Last Starfighter) emerges from a projection room at the cinema, where she had been getting busy with the projectionist, only to be attacked by a zombie almost immediately. She shows us in swift measure that the hours she has put into playing a Tempest arcade machine in the foyer have paid off; it is possible to be female, and a strong protagonist and a geek. This is an empowering role model for women in a decade where the definition of a powerful woman was large shoulder pads and being a bitch.
Fighting off her attacker, in a terribly choreographed and poorly executed fight scene, she makes off on a motorbike (not before realising that someone has taken one of the top ten high scores off her on the tempest machine) to find her sister Samantha (played by Kelli Maroney) – so far so good. Samantha’s there to provide us with the emotional link we need to understand that everyone they knew and loved are dead or zombies.
At their emotional meeting we get 30 seconds of weeping, but it seems like much, much longer, unbelievably longer, before the girls decide to crack on and head out into Los Angeles to find other survivors.
They soon team up with Hector (played by Robert Beltran [Chatokay – ST:Voyager] with him looking like a poor man’s Eric Estrada), a truck driver who survived by sleeping in the cab of his truck (also made of metal and not full of glass or anything).
You would think that these last survivors would team up, safety in numbers and all that… but that would be far too sensible. The girls (one being 18ish and the other about 15 – both played by woman north of 25 years old) decide that as it’s the end of days, they should go on a shopping spree. Eric, sorry Hector, on the other hand heads home to check on his mum (good lad!)
Needless to say, things don’t go well for the girls. Their fun-time shopping spree / dressing up montage complete with ‘girls just wanna have fun’ soundtrack is rudely interrupted by some zombie gangbangers wielding machine guns. The girls give it their best but when Samantha tries to escape and is captured, Regina stops hurling shoes at them (that great machine gun stopping weapon) and surrenders.
Enter stage-left the scientists and their soldier minions who survived the comet in their military bunker. They must have kicked themselves when they realised, they could have saved their money building it and instead bought a bunch of rusty old caravans to hide in.
The scientists rescue the girls as you would expect, but all is not at first what it seems. The scientists are slowly being turned into zombies and need the blood from the girls to keep them alive. But not a little blood, they need to kill them and take it all apparently.
Let’s just take this in a moment. How are Eric, sorry Hector, and the girls alright even though they slept in a truck, a doghouse and a cinema projector room but the scientists in their multi-million-dollar fallout shelter are shafted? It seems that scientist are clever, but not very practical. Someone left the air vents open apparently!
Regina is piled into the back of their van and taken back to the base but poor Samantha is too young and has to be put down by one of the scientists; the morose Audrey (Mary Woronov).
Meanwhile, Eric, sorry Hector (must stop comparing the two) finds that his family are all dead, so he fills a ‘magical’ pillowcase with a trophy and some other knick-knacks before scarpering from a zombie child. He returns to find Audrey has developed a conscience, she has killed herself but let Eric, (damn it) Hector, instructions on where to find Regina.
What follows is the most bizarre way to breach a compound ever (with the exception of Hard Ticket to Hawaii) involving a cowboy disguise for no reason whatsoever. At the same time Regina, being the strong independent woman and role model we know she is, has already started her escape and has rescued two children, played by actual children.
In a bizarre finale the kids, the girls and budget Puncherello are attacked close quarters by a scientist turned zombie. Regina pulls out her gun, before, throwing it to Hector (got it this time!) so he can save them; so much for girl power.
The survivors then go off to live a life as a pseudo family, with no explanation at all about why all the trailer park people, who clearly would have been in metal boxes, are now not running the city. Also, not a passing thought to a scenario that leads to a 35-year-old man shagging an 18 year old girl, while her 15 year old sister pines for his enchilada #OperationYewTree.
But that’s not all, to save Samantha from this potentially difficult scenario, out of nowhere, driving one of his many sports cars (there’s no-one to claim otherwise now) comes Danny Mason Keener with his personalised plate to whisk her away and save her from a three-way with her sister.
It’s only as they drive away that Regina recognises the initials on his plate and realises that this is the bastard that got onto the high score machine in the cinema.
Night of the Comet could have been a good film. It could have done so much to create a strong role model for women; self-assured, empowered and independent. Instead, it continues to undermine any success it makes, somehow managing to ignore every opportunity presented to it. It fails to be an action film, it fails to be a horror film and it fails to be a comedy. That is not to say there are no elements of action, horror or comedy in the movie but it does not invest in any one element well enough to make its mark. It only succeeds in being a boring, pointless affair. The movie leaves you with a sense of a cheap, poorly written and nonsensical debacle and a wasted opportunity.
Catherine Mary Stewart seems to have had a clause written into her contract that stops her from wearing anything revealing. But this means the only source of titillation is in the form of a 15-year-old girl and the sight of her changing into skimpy undies is not something that sits right with us at Plopcorn towers. There are a couple of great gaffs though that it’s worth watching out for during the film, the helicopter scene sees a supposedly deserted LA have a window cleaning crew half way up a skyscraper, Hector (got it again) takes his gloves off twice in the radio station and not to mention the man in a white shirt who walks into shot by the traffic lights and then walks out again
