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Night of the Comet was a campy 1984 science fiction horror movie made by writer/director Thom Eberhart.
The original working title of the film was Teenage Mutant Horror Comet Zombies, a nod to both its plot and its tongue-in-cheek attitude.
Spoiler Warning: Plot details and/or information about the ending follow. If you wish to enjoy the work first, stop reading here and return at another time.
The Plot
Two Los Angeles high school valley girls Regina (played by Catherine Mary Stewart) and Samantha (played by Kelli Maroney) are apparently the only survivors after Earth passes trough the tail of a comet.
Anyone who wasn't encased in a steel box during the pass-through was turned to dust. Those with partial exposure are slowly-turning. During this slow process, the exposed turn into flesh-eating zombies.
Regina survived by staying the night with her boyfriend, the projectionist in a old-time movie theatre, in the projection booth, which was apparently lined with steal due to fire codes. Regina lives, but her boyfriend is killed and eaten by a zombie.
Meanwhile, Samantha gets into a fight with Doris the girls' stepmother (played by Sharon Farrell) and accuses Doris of sleeping with Chuck the neighbor while Dad is off fighting Sandinistas in Honduras.
Confronting her stepmother, Samantha says, "You were born with an a--hole, Doris you don't need Chuck." Doris then slaps Samantha; Samantha slaps Doris back; Doris punches Samantha in the face and knocks he down before going into the street to watch the comet in the arms of Chuck.
Samantha runs away, but with no place to go, spends the night in the steel lawn shed, missing the comet.
Later, the girls meet up with a truck driver named Hector Gomez (played by Robert Beltran) who survived the comet by sleeping in the steel trailer of his truck. He leaves them to go check on his family in San Diego.
The two girls are rescued from zombies in a mall by scientists who holed themselves up in a secret desert location. Upon being relocated to the desert, the three discover that the scientists had been partially exposed to the comet - but have devised a way to drain the blood of the non-exposed and use transfusions to slow down the comet-to-zombie process.
The scientists plan to inject the three with chemical to make them brain dead to use the bodies as living blood factories (a concept used in many later films).
But Hector, after finding tragedy in San Diego, comes back to save the girls.
Through wit, luck and teamwork, the three plus a little boy and girl they save end up escaping the scientists. The scientists do eventually do turn into zombies after all. They meet up with another teenage boy and set out to restart the human race.
All to a 1980s dance music soundtrack.
External links
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