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Night of the Comet
WHY'D I WATCH IT?
Night of the Comet is a pointless movie with promotional artwork far cooler than it deserves.
I say it's a pointless movie because very little comprises the middle area between the setup and the ending. A comet is set to fly by the planet one night and an unrealistic amount of people decide to go outside to see it. Boom, rapture.
Everyone who isn't instantly reduced to dust is inconsistently afflicted with a disease which reduces them to dust zombies at an inconsistent rate.
After the grief has quickly come and gone, a gratuitous montage of Cyndi Lauper's Girls Just Want to Have Fun plays as our two main heroines try on clothes and bide time waiting for "The Last Man On Earth" to return to them only to then be jumped by some sadistic dudes who are just a tinge too creepy to be wasting a bullet killing them both. They get saved by a research crew who have somehow been researching this dust disease thing, Alpha Bitch acts all heartless about wanting to save kids and the research crew splits up our two heroines only for Alpha Bitch to euthanize one of them, ostensibly to save them from the disease.
BUT LO, as it turns out, it was all a ruse, for Alpha Bitch kills herself for real(?) shortly before it's revealed that the injection given to our heroine was fake! Turns out the research crew is evil and trying to capture people and harvest their blood in an attempt to find a cure to slow the disease. "The Last Man On Earth" returns for a timely rescue and all of the characters who matter make it out alive just to return to the same "yay for us, we're all alone again" montage.
On retrospect the plot raises some bizarre questions. Firstly, if Alpha Bitch gave Heroine #2 a fake lethal injection just to fool the one research crew guy there to make sure she does it, why did she immediately kill him afterwards? Like, it's even implied that she might go for her gun afterwards, but she still outdraws him. Pretty dumb.
Second, the serum is never found and all the researchers are dead. Soooo... does the dust disease really kill them in the 36 hours after the movie ends? Cause that was a mighty happy ending for what should be a real tonal dissonance. I'd like to emphasize that there's nothing in the way of the sort of subversion we got in Looker, where we played upbeat television jingles to people dying, it's just a generic running off into the distance credit roll with the same sort of music that's been playing throughout the rest of the movie.
And that is to say that the "horror" genre that this movie is so often tarred with is wildly ancillary to the proceedings. You get maybe what, 3 total "horror scenes", each accompanied with a score designed specifically to spoil the jumpscares before they happen? Like there's one scene where Heroine #2 is stripping in a dark bathroom and the soundtrack just starts bleeding strings into the 80s pop.
Are you serious? Girl stripping in front of a mirror with high strings playing in the background? Thanks to for warning me that something's going to pop-up behind her. I realize this is an 80s movie but really, if the purpose was to scare, how do you accomplish that by wildly telegraphing that something scary is about to happen?
Maybe I just answered my own question there.
Anyway, the "zombies" are so fringe to the movie they're virtually non-existent. The plot could just as easily function without them. There's a grand total of 2 of them in the whole movie with 1 scene each, not including the 2 bad guys who are shown with eye makeup seconds before they both die.
In terms of a sort of 80s period movie (if you could call it that) it has some shots in the radio station building that look kinda cool, but most of it comes from the big hair and interchangeable pop soundtrack.
Distinctly inferior to the likes of Adventures in Babysitting.
Final Verdict: [Meh...]
Night of the Comet
Thriller / English / 1984
WHY'D I WATCH IT?
A classic example of an obscure 80s B-movie, featuring about what you'd expect.
WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
"My parents told me never to breathe anything from strangers."
Night of the Comet is a pointless movie with promotional artwork far cooler than it deserves.
I say it's a pointless movie because very little comprises the middle area between the setup and the ending. A comet is set to fly by the planet one night and an unrealistic amount of people decide to go outside to see it. Boom, rapture.
Everyone who isn't instantly reduced to dust is inconsistently afflicted with a disease which reduces them to dust zombies at an inconsistent rate.
After the grief has quickly come and gone, a gratuitous montage of Cyndi Lauper's Girls Just Want to Have Fun plays as our two main heroines try on clothes and bide time waiting for "The Last Man On Earth" to return to them only to then be jumped by some sadistic dudes who are just a tinge too creepy to be wasting a bullet killing them both. They get saved by a research crew who have somehow been researching this dust disease thing, Alpha Bitch acts all heartless about wanting to save kids and the research crew splits up our two heroines only for Alpha Bitch to euthanize one of them, ostensibly to save them from the disease.
BUT LO, as it turns out, it was all a ruse, for Alpha Bitch kills herself for real(?) shortly before it's revealed that the injection given to our heroine was fake! Turns out the research crew is evil and trying to capture people and harvest their blood in an attempt to find a cure to slow the disease. "The Last Man On Earth" returns for a timely rescue and all of the characters who matter make it out alive just to return to the same "yay for us, we're all alone again" montage.
On retrospect the plot raises some bizarre questions. Firstly, if Alpha Bitch gave Heroine #2 a fake lethal injection just to fool the one research crew guy there to make sure she does it, why did she immediately kill him afterwards? Like, it's even implied that she might go for her gun afterwards, but she still outdraws him. Pretty dumb.
Second, the serum is never found and all the researchers are dead. Soooo... does the dust disease really kill them in the 36 hours after the movie ends? Cause that was a mighty happy ending for what should be a real tonal dissonance. I'd like to emphasize that there's nothing in the way of the sort of subversion we got in Looker, where we played upbeat television jingles to people dying, it's just a generic running off into the distance credit roll with the same sort of music that's been playing throughout the rest of the movie.
And that is to say that the "horror" genre that this movie is so often tarred with is wildly ancillary to the proceedings. You get maybe what, 3 total "horror scenes", each accompanied with a score designed specifically to spoil the jumpscares before they happen? Like there's one scene where Heroine #2 is stripping in a dark bathroom and the soundtrack just starts bleeding strings into the 80s pop.
Are you serious? Girl stripping in front of a mirror with high strings playing in the background? Thanks to for warning me that something's going to pop-up behind her. I realize this is an 80s movie but really, if the purpose was to scare, how do you accomplish that by wildly telegraphing that something scary is about to happen?
Maybe I just answered my own question there.
Anyway, the "zombies" are so fringe to the movie they're virtually non-existent. The plot could just as easily function without them. There's a grand total of 2 of them in the whole movie with 1 scene each, not including the 2 bad guys who are shown with eye makeup seconds before they both die.
In terms of a sort of 80s period movie (if you could call it that) it has some shots in the radio station building that look kinda cool, but most of it comes from the big hair and interchangeable pop soundtrack.
Distinctly inferior to the likes of Adventures in Babysitting.