REPO YOUR ENTHUSIASM (17)

By: Elina Shatkin
May 25, 2024

One in a series of 25 enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of “offbeat” movies from the Eighties (1984–1993, in our periodization schema). Series edited by Josh Glenn.

NIGHT OF THE COMET | THOM EBERHARDT | 1984

In a decade filled with grim nuclear holocaust movies, Night of the Comet offers an odd, goofy counterpoint on our post-apocalyptic lives.

Teenage sisters Regina (Catherine Mary Stewart) and Samantha Belmont (Kelli Maroney) wake up one eerily silent morning to discover that most humans have been reduced to piles of red-orange “calcium dust” thanks to last night’s comet fly-by. Reggie survives because she’s busy “making it” with her boyfriend in a movie theater projection booth (decorated with a poster of the 1932 pre-code, colonialist romance Red Dust). Sam, after sassing her cartoonishly awful stepmom, gets a punch in the face (shrugged off as standard 1980s parenting) and sleeps in a lawn storage shed. Both girls are saved by their disobedience, a set-up that foreshadows the rest of the film. Armed and semi-dangerous, they leave their ranch-style San Fernando Valley home and, like the Omega Man before them, roll through a deserted downtown Los Angeles. While Charlton Heston fought monkish vampires, they dodge cannibal zombies.

The iconic image from the movie shows Sam, wearing her red, white and blue cheerleading uniform, wielding a machine gun. Lifted from a scene where she and Reggie, bored at the end of the world, shoot up a car for kicks, it’s weird and whimsical with a hint of violence, a good description of the overall film. The provocative visual goes a long way toward explaining why this B-movie, sometimes described as Valley Girl meets Night Of The Living Dead, became a cult classic. But like its heroines, the film — a commentary on gender, family, consumerism, and Reagan’s America — has layers.

Although the girls might look like the helpless hotties of many a low-rent exploitation flick, Reggie and Sam can mostly take care of themselves. With help from truck driver Hector (Robert Beltran), they outwit and thwart their aggressors, whether that’s a bunch of stockboys turned New Wave thugs or a cadre of smartypants researchers who decided to hole up in a desert bunker to ride out the comet but accidentally left the vents open. They’ve learned weaponry and self-defense from their Green Beret dad, a father we never see because he’s off fighting the Sandinistas. (No wonder the girls aren’t crushed or even upset about the loss of authority figures. They don’t have any they can respect. Instead, they have each other.) Despite the terrifying premise, the film isn’t grim or scary. Even at the end of the world, girls just wanna have fun.

“It’s ironic. Of all the great minds of the world, all the great intellects, who should survive?” one of the rapidly zombifying scientists scoffs. He dies a few scenes later. But Reggie and Sam are more than sufficient to rebuild society. You can spot their DNA in all sorts of onscreen heroines since then, from vampire slayer Buffy to the spy team in D.E.B.S., to the fight club in Bottoms. Who runs the post-apocalyptic world? Girls. The film’s conclusion, with Reggie and Hector dressed in formal clothes as they play mom and dad to two orphaned children, both recapitulates and satirizes the ideal heteronormative family.

***

MORE ENTHUSIASM at HILOBROW

REPO YOUR ENTHUSIASM (17)

Categories

Tags