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!