Republished from the show notes of my other site, Fuds on Film.
Mo’ comets, mo problems. Zombies weren’t perhaps entirely played out in 1984, with Romero releasing Day of the Dead a year later, but there’d certainly been enough of them released that people were starting to have a bit of fun with the genre. People like Thom Eberhardt, writing and directing Night of the Comet, which I’d never heard of, but Wikipedia assures me was a successful outing that’s become a cult classic, influencing the likes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. So, already off to a bad start, then.
A particularly bothersome comet passes close to Earth around Christmastime, seemingly vaporising the majority of people on earth, unbeknownst to teen cinema worker Regina “Reggie” Belmont (Catherine Mary Stewart), who’d spent the night safety enclosed in a projection booth away from whatever agent has rendered most people to dust, and most of those left as, well, zombies. Sort of.
She emerges into this strange new world and attempts to track down her sister Sam (Kelli Maroney), the two drawn to the apparent broadcast location of a DJ that turns out to be a recording, but does bring them to trucker Hector Gomez (Robert Beltran), and together they must face the dangers of this new Los Angeles, from shop shelf stockers turned criminal kingpins to a team of scientists that might hold the key to survival – but perhaps only theirs.
I do not care about this film in the slightest. It is not terrible, but it’s also not particularly funny, or interesting, aside from the oddity of featuring the retroactively stereotyped fella off the crappy Star Trek show, I have little to nothing to say about it. So in a remarkable turn of events, I’ll just shut up and say there’s no reason to save this from its obscurity. Hard pass would be too extreme. Soft pass?