“Do you
think what happened here, happened everywhere?
Like Burbank and places like that?”
You know when a movie starts and you hear a synthesizer
score, with red credits on back, you are watching a 80’s movie. This one also has a very 80’s title, “The
Night of the Comet”. This falls into the
category of one of the end-of-the-world movies.
Some were the world is ending like “Miracle Mile” or "War Games". Others are the after the end like “The Road
Warrior” and “The Omega Man” “Comet”
follows the latter but showing the immediate aftermath of the end of
civilization. Catherine Mary Stewart
(The Last Starfighter) is Regina, a Valley girl who with along with her sister,
Smantha (Kelli Maroney) are part of the handful of people who survive the end
of the world brought on by the comet.
Also surviving are people who were partially exposed to the comet which
turns them into, you guessed it, zombies.
Watching from an underground base, also survivors, a think tank lead by
great character actor Geoffrey Lewis (The Way of the Gun) who with his group that
has an inescapable maze as a logo (genius) have dark unknown intentions towards
the girls and the last man on earth Hector (Robert Beltran).
Watching
now, it doesn’t hold up as well as it did in ’84, but it does move along pretty
quickly from the event, to the girls alone, meeting Hector, to eventually going
to the mall with the classic line “THE STORES ARE OPEN!” This leads to the best part of the film when the
girls run into the stock boys who have declared ownership of the mall, there is
a shoot-out, capture, villain monologue and the great “scary noises” game. From there it’s all about the think tank
group and their motives that drive the rest of the flick. The ending has a
great call back to the beginning and the movie hilariously ends with a romantic
duet singing during the closing credits about learning to love again. Like I said, it’s very 80’s in both good and
bad ways.
Like “Red
Dawn” what “Night of the Comet” does well, is it puts your mind in that scenario
and makes you think about what you would do in that situation. You, like me, may have gone so far into your
head that you lived out your own movie version of when the world ends, where
you and a select few are left in your own town.
Where would you go and what would you do? Maybe you should check out “Night of the
Comet” again, to remind yourself of who you were then, or maybe just to create
a new end-of-the-world plan.
--Robert L.
Castillo
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