Review #143: Night of the Comet (1984)


This review was originally written in October 2021.

October 2021 Horror Movie Review #29- Night of the Comet (1984)

This was... a strange movie. Despite being referred to by many as a zombie flick (I found it on multiple lists of "10 best zombie movies") the zombie presence is so slight, it might as well be completely absent. The main characters only encounter one full-on zombie in the entire movie, two zombies in a dream, a group of looters led by a partial zombie (were they all zombies? I don't know, more on that later), and I think one of the army guys was supposed to be partially a zombie at the end, but I'm not sure. I just don't really get what purpose the zombification was supposed to serve- I guess it served as an impetus for the science/army people to try and find a cure, but couldn't you have cut the zombification from the film entirely and just had it be a slow, creeping death that they're trying to find a cure for? That would have been way scarier in my opinion, considering what few zombies we DO see, are given not a single defining trait. Are they mindless? Not really. Are they hard to kill? No? Do they create more zombies by biting humans? Not that I know of! The zombies were just kind of... ugly people, in a movie with extremely few people to begin with.

To add on to all of this, the whole movie felt like two or three half-told stories loosely strung together. Who or what were the looters in the department store? Why were they there, and why were they so hostile towards the few surviving humans that showed up? I don't know, because the movie spent absolutely zero screentime developing that subplot. Who TF was the guy at the end of the film, and why did he just happen to show up in his sportscar the moment one of the characters decided to cross the street without a crossing signal (and why did anyone even care)? I don't know, and apart from tying him into a hanging chad from the beginning of the film (the Tempest high score subplot) it had zero relevance or connection to the rest of the movie. Did we ever learn what the science/army people were doing? Did we ever learn if there were other survivors? Were the protagonists safe, or were they slowly going to die and/or turn into zombies? I don't know, because the movie certainly didn't care to tell me!

The film was unabashedly 80s (including a completely random shopping montage set to Girls Just Wanna Have Fun) and it had a cool aesthetic, and I have to say, the opening premise got me hooked immediately, even if the rest of the movie just left me on that hook for the following ninety minutes. So it wasn't all bad, it just felt like the filmmakers couldn't decide what story they wanted to tell and then the story they DID tell accidentally got coffee spilled on it so they just forewent most of it. I would have liked to see more, but unfortunately this is all I got.

Overall Rating: 6/10 Sodium Pentathol Fakeouts

Alternate Title: Apparently the working title for this film was "Teenage Mutant Horror Comet Zombies". It just doesn't have the same ring to it, unfortunately!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Review #181: The Evil Dead (1981)

Image
This review was originally written in 2022. Gabe's 100 Bucket List Horror Films Review #36: The Evil Dead (1981) As much as I'm trying to make these reviews as standalone as possible, I feel the need to tie this one (at least a little bit) into the last one (The Texas Chain Saw Massacre) and the next one (Evil Dead II). So, bear with me I guess. I'm a huge fan of the Evil Dead series as a whole. Evil Dead II was one of the first horror films I ever saw, and for many years was my favorite movie of all time. However, I was never a very big fan of the first movie; I only saw The Evil Dead a couple times and when I did, it felt "lesser" than Evil Dead II in every way. I'll save most of my comments about EDII until the next review, but I just want to say that in this particular rewatch, I came out liking The Evil Dead WAY more than I used to, and liking Evil Dead II a little bit less (though I still love it). If you aren't familiar with the series at all, The E
Read more

Review #153: The Endless (2018)

Image
This review was originally written in 2022. Gabe's 100 Bucket List Horror Films Review #8 - The Endless (2018) A disclaimer: Most of this review is going to be me complaining about the logistics and mechanics of this movie, and it's going to be full of spoilers. I'll try to summarize my non-mechanical thoughts as concisely as possible. The Endless is an interesting film created by writing/directing duo Benson and Moorhead. Apart from Spring (which to my knowledge doesn't fit into this film's universe, though I could be mistaken) this was the first Benson & Moorhead joint I'd seen, and I was instantly intrigued by the premise: two brothers escaped a cult ten years ago, and after hearing that the cult was seemingly getting ready to kill themselves, they go back for one last visit to get some closure. When they get there, they realize that the cult's supernatural beliefs seem to be true, and they get caught up in a strange web of timey-wimeyness under the u
Read more

Review #179: It (2017)

Image
This review was originally written in 2022. Gabe's 100 Bucket List Horror Films Review #34: It (2017) I read It about twenty years ago; it's probably the longest book I've read in full. I think the book is very, very good (though also very, very Stephen King, which means there's a lot in its pages that makes it quantitatively worse than it could be) and for the most part this movie is a faithful adaptation... of half of it. I'll save most of my book vs. movie complaints for later on, but I'll just say that the book itself is two very important and very intertwined halves of a story, and while I understand the reasoning to cut it in half (doing the whole book justice would take well over four hours' worth of screentime), I really do think it does the whole story a disservice when this entire film starts and ends with the characters as kids. The book is constantly jumping back and forth between the child half of the story and the adult half, to the point where
Read more