Let's get this out of the way: In no way is Night of the Comet a bad movie. It may not have been an Academy Award (or even Saturn Award-winning) movie, but it was a wonderfully executed mixture of survival horror movies and teen comedies. Plus, it has Robert Beltrane, aka Chakotay from Star Trek: Voyager.
The title pretty much gives away the plot, but here it is: A comet hurdles toward Earth, dusting the atmosphere with a mutant pathogen. As the movie appeared in 1984, just two years before the return of Halley's Comet, it's not hard to see the inspiration. This particular comet, however, seems to rendezvous with Earth every 65 million years, meaning whatever it dropped here was responsible for killing the dinosaurs. If what happens to the humans in Night of the Comet is any indication, then the dinosaurs doom came from being turned into ravenous zombies.
In the film, the comet turns everybody in town into a zombie—everybody except for two teenage sisters who are forced to fend for themselves against disfigured and mutated zombie survivors. They're typical Valley Girls who love boys and shopping. But give the movie for unraveling that trope, giving the heros a chance to shoot Uzis while they battle to survive. The girls eventually find another survivor, played by Beltrane, and the three make their way through the world looking for other SoCal survivors on the way. They end up running into military scientists who want to use them as guinea pigs, and they have to figure out how to escape the base.
Night of the Comet has plenty of suspenseful moments, but also manages to capture a light, breezy tone running through the whole affair. It's a consummate B-movie, and a worthy addition to the zombie movie pantheon. It's also got Robert Bowen in it, a sure-fire way as there is to certify it as B-movie gold.
