1/4/2024 0 Comments Night of the comet![]() Meanwhile Samantha falls into a pit of depression, dreaming about zombies tearing her apart and sulking whenever she witnesses her sister’s blossoming relationship. Regina reveals to Hector how hard life has been after their dad went into the military, leaving she and Samantha with their stepmom. But that’s the best thing about Night of the Comet: the girls and their interpersonal/internal strife are the focus instead of standard undead antics. For a film where zombies - who can talk, shoot, dress themselves and drive cars, mind you - are immediately made out to be the biggest threat to either of our heroines’ safety, the multi-functional flesh eaters are forgotten rather quickly. It’s over who gets to be with Hector ( Star Trek: Voyager's Robert Beltran), the hunky truck driver they meet at an abandoned radio station. Before doomsday even arrives, there’s enough opportunity for suburban malaise to fill a Sweet Valley High novel.Īfter the comet passes - reducing all those who were anticipating its arrival to red dust (the better to match the now blood orange sky) - Regina and Samantha’s biggest battle isn’t over how to survive in this new wasteland. She makes it with Larry (Michael Bowen of Kill Bill infamy) - the cute, muscular, hog-riding projectionist playing classic prints on the side - while her sister Samantha (Kelli Maroney - cast as the ultimate '80s Valley Girl right down to the cheerleader outfit) wrangles with her probably philandering stepmother (Sharon Farrell) at home. The world watches the skies from various parties, waiting for the titular astral event to occur while, in a rundown Valley theater, Regina (the absolutely adorable Catherine Mary Stewart) protects her video game high score while “working” as an usher. Romero ( Night of the Living Dead , Dawn of the Dead ) used the apocalypse as a pulpy means to smuggle in subversive themes about race, class and consumerism, Eberhardt utilizes the end of all things as a backdrop for Hughesian teen angst. ![]() So, while Night of the Comet is certainly a time capsule for the decade in which it was made, there’s certainly much more to mine from the film’s brisk ninety-five minute runtime than a simple nostalgia trip. Eberhardt isn’t hitting the homage button as hard as Dekker, or showing his overt George Miller/Raymond Chandler/Sue Saad love like Pyun, but instead updates such ’50s schlock sci-fi classics as It Came From Outer Space ('53) with a heavy dose of ’80s neon. Writer/director Thom Eberhardt's Night of the Comet ('84) wouldn’t feel out of place on a double bill with Fred Dekker's Night of the Creeps ('86) or Albert Pyun's Radioactive Dreams ('85), as it shares a similar New Wave energy with those pictures while also keeping its cinematic tongue firmly in cheek. The sixty-second entry into this unbroken backlog is the New Wave zombie weird out, Night of the Comet. All in all, a mountain of movies to conquer. Some will be favorites, others oddities, with esoteric eccentricities thrown in for good measure. Not that there’s anything wrong with filmic “comfort food” (God knows we all have titles we frequently return to when we crave that warm and fuzzy feeling), but if you love movies, you should never stop searching for the next title that’s going to make your “To Watch” list that much more insurmountable. Ostensibly an extension of Everybody’s Into Weirdness (may that series rest in peace), The Savage Stack is a compilation of the odd and magnificent motion pictures you probably should be watching instead of popping in The Avengers for the 2,000th time. ![]() This column is here to make that problem worse. Whether it’s a pile of DVDs and Blu-rays haphazardly amassed atop our television stands, or a seemingly endless digital queue on our respective streaming accounts, there’s simply more movies than time to watch them. There’s always going to be – for lack of a better term – a stack of films we’ve been meaning to get to.
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