Feb 18 2009
B+ Movie Review: Night of the Comet
Monday, I reviewed a movie called Gangs of the Dead and spoke of the deep level of suck to which it managed to delve. What sticks with me about that film was how close it came to being cool and how much it had to work with versus what it actually did with it. This made me think of other zombie movies and what they did, both wrong and right.
Take for instance an 80’s classic, Night of the Comet.
Night of the Comet starts with a couple of Valley Girls, the prototypical 80’s girl who spent inordinate amounts of time at the mall, sported leg warmers and spoke in one of the most contagious slang dialects of the twentieth century (I’m sure there’s evidence to back me up on that last one somewhere). One is a cheerleader, the other works at a movie theater and at the opening of our film, they have no more concerns that shopping, having sex with their boyfriends and topping the high score on an arcade game (if you have to ask me what an arcade game is, I’ll have to slap you.)
As the opening exposition is kind enough to tell us, there’s a comet on the way and Earth is going to pass through it’s tail. This is cause for the masses to party in public and for a few more cautious souls to hide in bunkers. Turns out, of course, that the latter took the wiser path. The comet’s mojo turns people in to zombies, doomed to disintegrate but not before trying to maul the small remaining non-zombie population.
The girls manage to escape this fate by spending the night behind steel walls (the projection booth for one, the backseat of a car for the other). They meet up with a trucker who also survived and then go to fetch weapons from the National Guard Armory, which they know how to use because their dad is in the military.
The guns turn out to be necessary for more than mulching zombies as a group of scientists now want to capture the girls and figure out how to make a cure for the zombie disease out of their blood. Between zombies and rogue scientists, the girls and the audience are in for a bit of a ride.
The thing that made this stand out from other zombie movies, for me at least, was that it was more a period piece than a horror movie. It used the 80’s kitsch to connect with the audience and highlight some of the sillier aspects of the Valley Girl chic. This is true for about the first third of the movie, but that’s enough to set the tone.
Where the movie slacks off is in the last two thirds, in which it becomes more of a standard sci fi piece. If they’d kept the focus of the first part of the movie, it might have stepped beyond B movie territory and gone straight into genius. It didn’t, though and instead remained cute and entertaining.
While not a perfect film by any stretch of the imagination, Night of the Comet is a very watchable, enjoyable movie. It has almost no gore factor though which makes it more of an action film than horror, even if it does provide some deeply creepy scenes in the process (the guys in the mall and the game of “scary noises” stand out).
As of 2009, the 80’s are back in full force as evidenced by the teenage girls I’ve seen bopping about the mall in ripped jeans, tiger striped spandex pants and side ponytails. If anyone needed reference material for the look, this is one of the films I’d consider required viewing. Night of the Comet get’s a B from me, and a deserved one at that. Totally. I mean like gag me with a spoon.
