What do you do when a once in a lifetime comet trail blazes over Earth, reducing everyone in its wake to either a pile of red ash or a flesh hungry talking zombie? According to Thom Eberhardt‘s odd take on the apocalypse, you get hung up on someone stealing 6th place on the Hi Score of Tempest and go shopping/looting with your bubble permed, lycra clad, younger sister whilst dancing to Madonna singing Girls Just Want To Have Fun…
Incorrigibly light hearted, incredulously girl friendly and oh so incredibly 80′s, Night of the Comet plays out like a John Hughes movie – had he been inclined to helm a post apocalyptic romantic comedy. It’s less an End of the World picture, and more like Ferris Bueller’s (last ever) Day Off. With Zombies.
Despite the planet, and almost everyone who inhabit it, having been turned to curry powder, the principle characters’ main concern here, it seems, is finding a couple of hot guys to make out with…
Reggie Belmont (Catherine Mary Stewart – The Last Starfighter) and her sister awake the morning after the End of Days to find themselves alone with nothing much other than the prospect of spinsterdom and an automated radio show disc jockey to keep them company. Thankfully, hunky drifter Hector (Robert Beltran) and a team of bunker dwelling scientists have also survived, enabling a wafer thin premise to propel Eberhardt’s film to an illogical, yet highly enjoyable, climax.
The zombie theme is sadly and quickly sidestepped, making room for a nonsense plot involving a group of infected scientists (including Every Which Way but Loose‘s Geoffrey Lewis, and Andy Warhol’s gangly starlet Mary Woronov) who need to harvest the blood of the healthy survivors to find a cure to the post apocalyptic plague…
Eberhardt’s movie takes a firmly tongue in cheek stance and charms its audience with a comme ci comme ca approach to armageddon – even straddling the heady heights of post modernism in its reference to George A. Romero’s shopping mall nightmare in Dawn of the Dead, Victor Fleming’s The Red Dust (pun fully intended) and a whole slew of 50s B movie pictures. Interestingly, Night…’s subterranean scientist sub plot also prefigures Romero’s third instalment to the Dead trilogy, released the following year.
Everything about Night of the Comet points towards a film intent on taking the End of the World as non seriously as possible and making it a whole heap of innocent fun. The perfect tonic to a prevailing, depressing Cold War anxiety that bubbled under the surface during this time.
