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It's a Bad, Bad, Bad, Bad Movie

Reader Review


Night of the Comet

Posted by: Kevin Cogger
Date Submitted: Tuesday, April 13, 1999 at 15:47:44
Date Posted: Thursday, April 15, 1999 at 10:15:59

After watching this movie, I decided on what we must do to save mankind: invent a time erasure device and eliminate the eighties. We could replace them with something better, like maybe a repeat of the sixties. If you don't agree with me, just watch "Night of the Comet." Aside from being a bad movie, it absolutely revels in the fact that it was made in the eighties. Especially in the mall scene.

This is a fairly low-budget movie from sometime in the aforementioned decade. I missed maybe twenty minutes in the middle of it, but I have a good enough idea of what happened to be able to inform people about it, so they may draw near or shy away as deemed fit.

The plot basically goes that a comet is going to pass near Earth during the night it begins. No one seems to be worried at all about possible negative effects, including one person holding up perhaps the wimpiest sign I've ever seen, which says, "Don't worry! It will be okay!" Anyways, the comet comes, and guess what? It's not okay, sign-boy! Pretty much everyone dies by turning into a fine red powder (calcium dust, I think someone says later, although I'm not about to consult this movie for a chemistry final). A few people survive, and they're the main characters. Not that they're particularly interesting characters, but a movie about all the dead people would probably be even less interesting.

Two of the people who survive are sisters. One is the stereotypical cheerleader ditz kind of person, and the other is the stereotypical "I'm not a stereotype" woman with "street smarts" and "attitude." They meet a guy whom I'd describe as the kind of person who really likes eighties music. I don't know if he listened to any actual music on the movie, but he looked like he would.

Also surviving is a number of scientists in some top-secret government bunker. They actually seem kind of interesting at first, with some arguments about whether it's right to bring the survivors above ground into the base when they're going to die anyway (more on that later). But they soon devolve into standard movie government scientists: evil. In movies like this, the government is always evil, and so are scientists who don't personally know the heroes. So government scientists are twice as evil. They do fun stuff like tell little children they'll meet Santa Claus while planning to kill them.

And that brings me to the zombies. Of course there are zombies! Apparently, the process of turning into dust is slowed down for some people, so instand of just disintegrating they go through what's technically known as the "evil zombie" stage. I don't really understand these zombies. Some of them display definitely human intelligence -- firing guns, using security and power systems, taunting the heroes ("Missing something? Ha ha ha..."), etc. And yet they're just evil and want to kill people and feast on them for no apparent reason. You'd think that they'd retain some sort of morals along with their human intelligence (unless they were all psycho killers who would've feasted on people anyway, but I kind of doubt it), but nope.

Ok, one more thing. The script writers seem to have some sort of selective memory feature, so they only recall what's easy to write their way out of. The scientists state that all the survivors would become zombies and then dust eventually, and the cheerleader girl showed some signs of early zombification, but it wasn't an issue at the end. The scientists were working on a cure, but that portion of the plot just kind of ended. Maybe they mentioned it in the twenty minutes I missed, but I don't see what could all of a sudden cure the heroes and not the scientists. Well, whatever.

Y'know, maybe a movie about the piles of dust would be more interesting....

Turkey Rating: 3 -- it's pretty entertaining but not enough to keep me from missing part of it.

Scene to watch for: The mall.

Best Line: "Nice car." / "Thanks. I have 23 of them."

Things that make you go "Huh?": The eighties.


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