Movie: Night Of The Comet

I don't naturally gravitate toward thoughtful, serious, high-quality movies.  I like the movie equivalent of GooGoo Clusters or Andy Capp Hot Fries. That is to say, weird, a little hard to find, and not at all good for you.

So, of course I love Night Of The Comet. This Eighties horror-scifi-comedy-zombie-romance-spoof is the story of two teenage girls trying to survive zombie attacks at the end of the world ("Daddy would've gotten us Uzis"), and getting in some mall time while they're at it.

The teenage girls in question, Sam and Reggie (Catherine Mary Stewart and  Kelli Maroney) aren't your traditional screaming movie victims - they can take care of themselves, and other survivors while they're at it. They get a little help from truck driver Hector (Robert Beltran), but they could clearly have handled the whole thing themselves.

I find myself imagining the scriptwriters, having learned their characters inside out, delightedly thinking up one situation after the other - dangerous, exciting, funny scenes - to put them in. The red light. The mall. The stock boys. Santa Claus. The bunny. The red light again. It all combines into an absurd but highly satisfying plot.  It's fun, lots of fun. I recommend seeing it before it goes out of print again.

Link Roundup: Rotten Tomatoes and IMDB and Wikipedia and NightOfTheComet.info.

Photo: By Mattia Luigi Nappi. Wikimedia Commons.