Night of the Comet (1984) ***

     I’m as baffled by this as you’re about to be, believe me: How the hell am I only just now getting around to watching Night of the Comet?! Despite its PG-13 rating (or maybe even because of it, now that I really give the subject some thought), Night of the Comet is not only one of the true cult classics of 1980’s horror, but a formative taste-making influence for many fans of the genre from my generation. Between a short but intense stint as a cable TV staple and a prominent home video presence, it was the kind of movie that taught kids of the 80’s how to appreciate fright films in the first place. Somehow or other, though, I missed it during what passed for its heyday, and then never got around to it in all the years since. And having now seen it at last, I think maybe I did myself a solid by waiting so long. Strange as it may sound, I’m not sure I’d have gotten Night of the Comet when I was part of its actual target audience. I suspect that I’d have found its low intensity irritating, and the focus of its story boringly misplaced. You see, although this movie sporadically threatens its adolescent protagonists with ethically challenged scientists and zombie-like creatures ranging in temperament from psychopathic to utterly feral, it’s mostly about a pair of Valley Girl sisters just struggling to come to terms with the end of the world as they knew it. Perversely, I think I needed to grow old enough to be those kids’ father in order to gain the perspective required to see their situation through their eyes.

     Eighteen-year-old Regina Belmont (Catherine Mary Stewart, from The Apple and The Last Starfighter) and her younger sister, Samantha (Kelli Maroney, of Chopping Mall and The Zero Boys), may have heightened versions of the problems typical for affluent teens in mid-80’s Los Angeles, but the problems themselves are typical indeed. Broken home; frequently absent, work-obsessed father; contentious relationship with their stepmother; low-key but pervasive sibling rivalry— all the usual stuff. It’s just that most kids in the Belmont girls’ position didn’t lose their mothers because Dad came home from Vietnam a little bit crazy. Their workaholic fathers aren’t Special Forces majors prone to disappearing into various Latin American trouble spots for months at a time. And their stepmothers… Well actually, Doris (Sharon Farrell, from The Eyes of Charles Sand and Arcade) isn’t far out of the ordinary at all, except that she’s maybe a little worse at disguising her resentment at having to raise some other woman’s children, and a little more careless about the affairs she has with the neighbor men while her husband is away fighting communists.

     Anyway, it’s less than two weeks to Christmas (although the Los Angeles climate makes that easy to miss), but excitement over the holiday is eclipsed on this occasion by anticipation of something else much more extraordinary. After all, Christmas, as the Beach Boys said, comes this time each year, but the big, weird comet due to pass by the Earth on the night of Friday, December 13th, hasn’t visited our orbital neighborhood in 65 million of them. If that number sounds familiar to you, it’s also the approximate date of the mass extinction that closed out the Cretaceous Period— and the mid-1980’s were about when pop culture started to assimilate the formerly heterodox hypothesis that the demise of the dinosaurs might have had an astronomical cause. The coincidence is not lost on a coterie of scientists led by one Dr. Carter (Geoffrey Lewis, from Out of the Dark and Salem’s Lot), who consequently plan to spend the Night of the Comet in a subterranean laboratory bunker beneath the Mojave Desert. Most of the world’s population, though, is looking to get in some primo stargazing, and Friday the 13th finds every city on the globe gearing up for a rolling timezone-by-timezone comet party.

     Regina therefore feels like she’s missing out when she not only gets called in to work the late shift at the El Rey movie theater, but also allows herself to be persuaded to camp out overnight in the projection booth, of all places, with her boyfriend, Larry Dupree (Michael Bowen, of Forbidden World and The Last House on the Left). Larry was planning to hide out there after closing time, anyway, because he supplements his income by smuggling rare films that come through the El Rey to video pirates, and a pristine 3-D print of It Came from Outer Space arrived from the distributor that morning. Dupree’s usual practice is to hand over the reels to his contacts just after everyone else has gone home for the night (his cleanup duties as projectionist are sufficiently complex that he can plausibly contrive to be the last to leave on pretty much any evening), and then to lie low in the booth until 6:00 AM to reclaim them before the start of the next day’s screenings. He figured Regina could join him this time, and they could pass the hours doing things that Doris wouldn’t approve of. The booth has no windows except for the ones mostly obstructed by the projectors, and the thick, steel-cored walls mandated by the fire code are almost totally soundproof. No one would ever notice they’re there, even if somebody let themselves back into the theater after hours.

     Meanwhile, by a curious coincidence, Samantha also ends up spending the night sequestered inside a windowless steel box, because she has a fight with her stepmother. Sam’s attempt to flounce out of the house is thwarted, though, by the street congestion attendant upon the neighborhood’s share of the greater Los Angeles comet party, so she seeks solitude by locking herself in the garden shed overnight. Thus do both of the Belmont sisters unwittingly place themselves among the few people on Earth to escape reenacting the fate of the dinosaurs.

     What happens is a bit like The Day of the Triffids, only much, much worse. Anyone directly exposed to whatever the comet is emanating dies almost immediately, their bodies desiccating into just a few pounds of reddish, calcium-rich dust. Those who are partially shielded— who are indoors when the comet passes overhead, but not otherwise insulated from its mysterious influence— succumb to the same process, only more gradually. Depending on the sturdiness of their shelter, the withering of their tissues might take hours or even days instead of mere minutes, but as degeneration settles into the nervous system, they descend into dangerous psychosis. Only those screened by some solid metal enclosure are completely unaffected.

     Anyway, of the people we’ve met so far, Larry is the first to encounter one of the changed semi-survivors, when he mistakes a man far gone into zombiedom banging around in the alley behind the El Rey for his video pirate returning with the print of It Came from Outer Space. It takes Regina a while to notice how tardy the boy is in returning from his rendezvous, and by then Larry’s killer has made enough progress in eating him that she doesn’t recognize what she’s looking at when she comes upon the scene in the alley. No Green Beret’s kid grows up without learning how to shoot and fight, however, so the zombie finds Regina a much more formidable opponent than her boyfriend. She rides off on her motorcycle after clobbering what she assumes to be an unusually aggressive deinstitutionalized mental patient, which leads her to become the first character of our acquaintance to glimpse the bigger picture: the deserted streets, the eerie red smog, the even eerier piles of discarded clothes with similarly ruddy dust spilling out of them. Only when Regina reaches home and is reunited with Samantha does she see a single other person, or indeed any living thing at all. Sam takes some convincing before she’ll accept the full, bewildering horror of what happened last night, but the facts outside the girls’ front door ultimately speak for themselves. Then it dawns on them that the local rock radio station is still broadcasting.

     The Tower of Power turns out to be something of a false lead, insofar as the overnight shift is managed by an ingenious contrivance of automated tape players. Racing over to the station does bring the sisters into contact with another survivor, though, because San Diego-based long-haul trucker Hector Gomez (Robert Beltran, from Shadowhunter and Calendar Girl Murders) had the very same idea upon tuning in the station’s broadcast. Each side is wary of the other at first, but it doesn’t take long for Gomez and the Belmont girls to agree that since they’re all in this awful situation together, they might as well try to make friends. Also, it isn’t that hard to get the hang of a radio control desk, so the transmitter offers an unparalleled opportunity to reach out to anyone else who might have survived the apocalypse. Then again, maybe that isn’t as good an idea as it sounds, because not everybody within range is as agreeable company as Hector. The feral comet zombies that have already made their presence felt are bad enough, but there’s an even worse breed of them that retain enough intelligence to execute plans and to operate machinery. The greatest threat of all, though, is that bunker full of scientists out in the desert. Dr. Carter regards everyone still living above ground as a potential guinea pig for medical experiments aimed at arresting or reversing the course of the comet sickness, and among his subordinates, only Dr. White (Mary Woronov, from Silent Night, Bloody Night and Warlock) has the slightest qualms against carrying out such grisly research even on children.

     From one angle, it’s possible to view Night of the Comet as the tamest zombie movie of the entire 1980’s, with the sole arguable exception of Raiders of the Living Dead. I reckon that’s just how I would have looked at it, too, had I first encountered the film back when everybody else in my age cohort did. Thus my assumption that twelve- or thirteen-year-old El Santo would not have been greatly impressed, evaluating Night of the Comet in comparison to Evil Dead II, Re-Animator, and The Return of the Living Dead. Again, though, it’s likely that this movie’s lack of serious transgression was a big part of what made it the kind of cult favorite that it became. Night of the Comet was, for a lot of 80’s kids, their zombie movie training wheels, and it’s admirably well suited to that role. The comet zombies always deliver a good jolt upon arrival, but aren’t horrible enough to be truly disturbing once the adrenaline spike from the jump scare recedes. Also, because Larry is the only character whom we have reason to care about who actually falls victim to one, the threat that they pose remains mostly theoretical. Similarly, the Stage II comet casualties are defeated before they can begin to make good on their genuinely chilling taunts to the Belmont sisters (“You wouldn’t believe what we want from you. In your worst nightmare, you wouldn’t believe.”), making them memorable villains, but not traumatizing ones. And the scientists in the bunker serve as a relatively gentle introduction to the zombie movie commonplace that the Proper Authorities are not your friends, insofar as their most nefarious schemes can be thwarted by two teenaged girls and a hunky trucker. These are unusually strict limits that Night of the Comet has set for itself, but it’s very effective within them.

     It’s more effective still, however, at being an end-of-the-world character study in the vein of The World, the Flesh, and the Devil or The Quiet Earth. This is a much subtler, much quieter sort of apocalypse story, which one rarely sees told in a context that also supports active, primal threats to the protagonists like zombies or mad scientists. It’s for that very reason that I’m so well disposed toward Night of the Comet now, because there aren’t a lot of movies that successfully strike this complicated balance between thrills, humor, and earnest melancholy. For all the catharsis inherent in the annihilation of the shallow, selfish, consumerist culture that was the only world the Belmont sisters ever knew before the comet, writer/director Thom Eberhardt takes seriously the loss that it nonetheless represents. For all that Larry’s handful of scenes establish him as an immense douchebag, Eberhardt shows us in no uncertain terms that Regina regarded him as her douchebag, and her grief over him feels both legitimately earned and plausibly short-lived. And few details in this movie feel truer or realer than Sam’s helpless despair, in the midst of all the other much larger things she has to despair over, that she just doesn’t stand a chance with Hector so long as Regina is around.

     As that last bit ought to imply, Eberhardt displays throughout Night of the Comet a surprisingly strong grasp of sisterly relationship dynamics. He’s especially good with the paradoxical way in which sororal love and devotion can coexist alongside heedlessness toward each other’s feelings. It’s obvious that Regina would do anything for Sam (and she’ll pretty much have to before it’s all over), but she spends the whole first half of the film blithely oblivious to the emotional toll that the whole situation is taking on the younger girl. Also, putting two sisters in the position of having to compete romantically for what might well be the world’s last non-zombified man does interesting things to the love triangle aspect of the film carried over from The World, the Flesh, and the Devil. The more closely you compare this movie to that one (or, for that matter, to earlier copycats like The Last Woman on Earth), the more apparent it becomes that narrative focus and point of view alike remain fixed throughout on Regina and Samantha. This never becomes Hector’s story, even on those rare occasions when he’s onscreen, and the girls aren’t. Consequently, Night of the Comet remains a uniquely feminine interpretation of the material. The movie belongs utterly to Catherine Mary Stewart and Kelli Maroney from a performance standpoint, and it can’t be overstated how ably they carry it.

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