Review for Night of the Comet

A thought shared by many involved in this low-budget, low-brow 80’s sci-fi horror flick is ‘who’d have thought this would become such a cult classic’? Well, timing and nostalgia certainly play a part (this was an VHS rental favourite and pure-eighties in style) but to be fair, it’s also a highly entertaining film.

It’s a homage to ‘last man on earth’ movies like ‘The Omega Man’ as well quite a knowing nod and a wink to Romero zombie movies. It also has two eighties chicks as heroes and an almost wall-to-wall eighties music soundtrack. In short, a lot of fun.


But it’s by no stretch a ‘great movie’. Writer/director Thom Eberhardt (‘Honey I blew up the Kid’) has spent most of his career making TV shows like Diagnosis: Murder and turning in perfectly workmanlike TV movies but it was with his first proper feature film, ‘Night of the Comet’ that he struck cult gold.


Released the same month as Ghostbusters, The Karate Kid and The Never Ending Story, getting a big theatrical return was never going to be easy, although Eberhardt claims in his commentary that it somehow made it into the top-ten box-office taking for one particular week.


When two sisters, Regina and Samantha (Catherine Mary Stewart and Kelli Maroney) who are every ounce sassy valley girls, wake up one morning (one in a steel-lined theatre projection room having spent the night with the projectionist, and the other in a steel shed having had a fight with her step-mother), they emerge to a world where everyone else, bar a few survivors, have disappeared, turned to dust by a liquid and calcium sucking comet which passed earth the previous evening. Of those left, the majority were ‘partially exposed’ meaning they are turned into violent zombies before eventually turning to dust themselves.


When they realise that the radio station is still running they make their way there, only to find that the broadcasts are automated and there is no sign of life. Well, except for a male survivor, truck driver Hector (Robert Beltran, Star Trek Voyager) who survived as he was sleeping with a girl in the back of his steel lined truck the night before.


They decide to split up – he in search of his family, and they in search of weaponry (including machine guns) and clothes and make-up in a nearby mall. Only the mall is zombie infested (‘Dawn of the Dead’ anyone?) and things look bad until a military unit arrive and rescue them.

This is a group who have been living in an underground bunker and need the blood of survivors to stay live. However, due to a rash they believe one of the sisters may be infested so they set about ‘putting her to sleep’.

In the meantime, Hector finds his house empty save for a child zombie who sets about attacking him. But will he be able to escape in time to find and rescue the girls? Nah – I’m not going to spoil it here for you.


The most impressive aspect to the film is the exterior shots of an abandoned down-town LA, filmed early on Christmas morning in 1983 as this was the only possible time to get such shots. That’s dedicated movie making.

All the fashion, hair styles (apparently they had to keep checking the camera gate for hairs as this was such a ‘big hair’ production!) and music exudes the eighties in its most enduring form. As a result it’s a gift for nostalgia freaks. There are primitive looking video games, cassette players, large house phones, flicked and big hair, eighties cars and a soundtrack so eighties that you’ll swear you've moved back in time.

Picture quality is probably close to how you remember it first time, all a bit grainy, washed out and soft. If you play the Blu-Ray you’ll probably check at least one that you haven’t played the DVD by accident. In other words, it may be an AVC/MPEG-4 1080p encode but it’s far from special. Probably not worth double-dipping for if you have the DVD already.

The audio is listed on the menu as stereo but it’s 48khz 24-bit mono – perfectly good but just not as described.

What added at least a couple of points for me was the extra features. Arrow have really gne to town with this and they’re generally as much fun to watch as the movie itself.

There are three audio commentaries (who’d have thought a ilm like this would get a treatment like that?) and they all have positive points, though Eberhardt is, understandably, the most informative. The actors’ commentary (with the two girls) is fun and full of anecdotes, as is production and costume designer, John Muto’s.

There’s a really fun 2013 interview with the two girls as they are today, called ‘Valley Girls at the End of the World’ which runs for 15 minutes.

Another featurette ‘The Last Man on Earth?’ (12 minutes) does the same job with Robert Beltran who talks about being cast for the film thanks to his success on ‘Eating Raoul’ as well as a number of differences of opinion on aspects of the production that must have caused some tension at the time of shooting.

In ‘End of the World Blues’ we see a ten minute 2013 interview with Mary Woronov who played the part of a scientist amongst the military group who was the first to realise that they had been exposed to the comet and their days were numbered. A strange interview with a strange lady but that’s actors for you…

‘Curse of the Comet’ (6 minutes approximately) is an interview with makeup supervisor David B. Miller filmed in 2013.

Also included is a Theatrical Trailer, a reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Gary Pullin, and a decent collector’s booklet featuring new writing on the film by James Oliver illustrated with original archive stills and posters – some of which you can see sprinkled throughout this review.

If you love slightly stilted, so bad its good, eighties drive-in sci-fi horror then this edition of ‘Night of the Comet’ is definitely for you.