Night of the Comet
It’s not a typical apocalypse, nor was the inspiration as obvious as the inescapable cold war angst during the escalating tensions between Reagan’s America and the revolving political door of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics at the time, Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko and Gorbachev within a matter of months. Instead, writer and director Thom Eberhardt says the muse for his 1984 feature was actually a romantic comedy released eighteen months previously, director Martha Coolidge’s Valley Girl, starring Deborah Foreman and a teenage Nicholas Cage.
Seized by the idea of how a pair of valley girls would cope if they were among the only survivors at the end of the world (answer: by shopping!), Eberhardt drew his science fiction scenario from two key sources, the almost forgotten last-people-left-behind Target Earth (director Sherman A Rose, 1954), the early scenes of which Eberhardt describes as “riveting” and the first broadcast episode of The Twilight Zone, Where Is Everybody? (1959), as a lone man desperately seeks another soul in a deserted town.
Another influence is apparent in the opening voiceover monologue of “the last few years of the 20th century,” paralleling the iconic “No one would have believed, in the last years of the nineteenth century, that human affairs were being watched keenly and closely” of H G Wells’ The War of the Worlds, but rather than a projectile from Mars trailed by a green mist, it is the tail of a comet that the Earth is passing through, an event which has allegedly not occurred in sixty five million years, the time of the extinction of the dinosaurs.
Perhaps coincidentally, as Arrow release their remastered Blu-ray of Night of the Comet, the Earth is just about to pass through the tail of perhaps the most famous of all comets, that identified in 1705 by Edmond Halley as having a periodicity of 75.3 years, as the debris left behind generates the Orionid meteor shower on 21st-22nd October, but while the results may be spectacular, it is unlikely that all those who are unshielded during the spectacle will become victims of the comet.
In scenes reminiscent of the opening of The Day of the Triffids, comet fever has gripped California, with street parties celebrating the celestial display as the cometary dust burns up in the atmosphere, but neither Regina Belmont (Catherine Mary Stewart) nor her younger sister Samantha (Kelli Maroney) are attending; Reggie is hiding out in the projection room of the cinema where she works as an usher to spend some private time with her make-do boyfriend Larry (Michael Bowen, who had previously appeared in Valley Girl) and Sam has been grounded after an argument with their stepmother
But when Reggie rises the next day having fallen asleep in the cinema and overslept, the world has changed; Larry has left her and not returned, and when she goes to find him she is attacked by a deformed creature which she must fight off before escaping on a motorbike. And everywhere she rides, she sees nobody on the silent streets, no traffic, no pedestrians, only strange trails of dust woven through piles of abandoned clothes. Arriving home she is relieved to find Sam is safe, but everyone they know is gone, and they realise they may be alone in the world, the only sign of life a voice on the radio…
Writer and director Thom Eberhardt has had an eclectic career, from Without a Clue (1988) where Michael Caine and Ben Kingsley played a role reversal imbecile Sherlock Holmes and genius John Watson, the script for Honey, I Blew Up the Kid (1992), and the Kurt Russell/ Martin Short comedy Captain Ron (1992), but even here in his second feature after 1983’s Sole Survivor, loosely based on James Herbert’s novel The Survivor, he demonstrates the contrariness which has marked his work.
Even thirty years later it remains unusual to have a science fiction film led by teenage girls, but Reggie is far from a typical teen movie decorative girlfriend, an awesome gamer with a string of high scores on the arcade game in the cinema foyer who knows more about Superman than her boyfriend, she puts her cinematic peers to shame, remaining calm in a crisis and able to put her self-defence classes to good use; whether the motorbike is her own or she commandeers is unclear, as the way she rides means it’s hers now, and Stewart believes that was a reason for the success of the film which targeted a non-traditional demographic: “Girls are empowered by it.”
Also known for lead roles in The Last Starfighter (1984) and Weekend at Bernie’s (1989), Stewart shared a background in the grind of daytime soap operas with her onscreen sister which prepared them for the shoot, Maroney recalling the ethos as “Get in there, be prepared, do your thing.” Having originally hoped to play the elder sister, Maroney, who has also appeared in Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) and Chopping Mall (1986) as well as roles in Murder, She Wrote and True Blood, remained friends with Stewart after shooting was concluded.
Neither are Reggie and Sam the only strong women in evidence: Doctor Audrey White of the rescue team which comes from the desert to the city to take the girls back to the underground government installation is cynical and pragmatic; she may appear unfeeling, but she recognises that she has only a limited time until the dust infection takes its toll on her and cannot afford to allow sentiment to interfere with her mission, though Mary Woronov was less than thrilled about the character. “I’m a scientist and I found that really boring. I didn’t like that. And I didn’t have any comedy scenes.”
A recurring genre star with appearances in Death Race 2000 (1975), Heartbeeps (1981), Warlock (1989), Looney Tunes: Back in Action (2003), The Devil’s Rejects (2005) and the Babylon 5 episode Born to the Purple, Woronov was also reunited with Robert Beltran, her co-star from the 1982 cult favourite cannibal comedy Eating Raoul best known for his seven years as first officer Commander Chakotay on Star Trek Voyager but here playing Hector Gomez, a trucker Reggie and Sam believe might be the last man on Earth.
Having already turned the role down twice as the character was too similar to Raoul, Beltran eventually accepted the role in return for top billing and rewrites which he felt gave better representation: “How many films have there been when the last man on Earth is a Mexican American?” He also speaks highly of Stewart and Maroney who “worked hard to get that feeling of sisters, the rivalries and the love,” and Eberhardt, “very talented, very nice man… very much in control.”
Interestingly, in a candid and entertaining interview included in the package, Woronov states that she auditioned for the role of Captain Kathryn Janeway on Voyager with the producers having a view to reuniting her with Beltran specifically to capture the onscreen romantic spark of Eating Raoul, eventually leading to a full blown affair between the two, but Woronov rejected the offer as she didn’t want to be tied to television.
With a post apocalypse shopping spree to a cover of the Cyndi Lauper anthem Girls Just Want to Have Fun, at times it seems as though the producers secured the soundtrack in return for exposure for the contributing bands, and Night of the Comet seems to exist in a corner untouched by time, no doubt helped by the presence of Geoffrey Lewis as the leader of the government think tank, Doctor Carter.
A ubiquitous figure of cinema through the seventies and eighties, Lewis worked with actor-director Clint Eastwood on several films including High Plains Drifter (1973), Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974), Every Which Way But Loose (1978), Any Which Way You Can (1980) and Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1997) and whose genre appearances include The Lawnmower Man (1992), The Devil’s Rejects (2005), ‘Salem’s Lot and The X-Files (Tithonus); he is also the father of actress and singer Juliette Lewis.
Despite limited resources, Eberhardt makes inventive use of them, with the tinted skies making it an interesting film to watch, the oppressive use of silence as in the scene when Reggie first arrives home to what should be a place of safety and domesticity, and unusual settings such as the radio station and the mall after hours. “Night shoots are always a total drag,” Stewart recalls, though conversely the deserted city scenes required daylight: “I seem to recall we shot first thing in the morning on Christmas morning.”
Featuring a nightmare within a nightmare reminiscent of An American Werewolf in London (1981) and a cinema lobby adorned with posters from The Beastmaster, Escape from New York, Tarzan, Death Race 2000 and the very film which inspired it, Valley Girls, another inspiration may have been Star Trek’s The Omega Glory where bodies exposed to a contaminant dissolved to crystalline dust leaving only clothing, though not as instantaneously as in Steven Spielberg’s 2005 version of War of the Worlds, but Night of the Comet manages what many similar films do not.
Between Reggie, Sam, Audrey and wicked stepmom Doris (Sharon Farrell of The Man from U.N.C.L.E, The Beverly Hillbillies, Hawaii Five-O and Freddy’s Nightmares) it passes the Bechdel test easily, as while the girls certainly talk about guys a lot, they also discuss other subjects including guns, bemoaning that the “MAC 10 machine gun was probably designed for housewives” and that “Daddy would have gotten us Uzis.”
Also featuring an interview with special make-up effects creator David B Miller and multiple audio commentaries, one with Eberhardt, another with stars Stewart and Maroney and a final one with production designer John Muto, Night of the Comet may not be groundbreaking in terms of outstanding drama or original ideas, but it is certainly entertaining and as comprehensively packaged as would be expected from Arrow. After all, “the burden of civilisation is upon us.”
Night of the Comet is now available from Arrow Films
