Cometary Track

Night of the Comet (1984) totally counts as a post-apocalyptic zombie horror movie, but I queued it up because it's a cheesy 80s teen comedy. So why not?

Mary Catherine Stewart "works" at a B-movie palace - "works" in quotes because she spends most of her time making sure her name is the only one on the leader board of the lobby video game. I guess she's hoping for Robert Preston to show up, like in Last Starfighter. The projectionist has a scheme to spend the night with her in the projection booth, while the rest of the world is out watching a spectacular comet pass by overhead.

For example, all the neighbors will be out having an all-night comet party. Her mother will be there, snuggling with some guy from next door because her father is in El Salvador fighting commies. Her sister, a cheerleader valley-girl airhead (Kelli Maroney), will miss it, because she got grounded, ran away from home and slept in a garden shed.

The next morning, everyone is gone. The projectionist is gone, leaving a bloody smear. The block party is gone, leaving little piles of red dust. Only Stewart and Maroney, some zombies and the radio station are left. The radio station turns out to be on auto-pilot, but they meet one more survivor, Robert Beltran. Now the problem becomes, how can two girls survive the apocalypse with only one boy to hook up with.

Fortunately, an underground lab full of scientists are going to make everything better. Although, scientist Mary Woronov doesn't seem too sunny. Oh well, end of the world, flesh-eating zombies, kind of a bummer, I guess.

This isn't a big comedy like, say Shawn of the Dead, but it's pretty funny. It has fun with cheap horror movie conventions and with the whole 80s milieu. I might have liked it even more if I watched more of the movies it parodies. I don't know why it isn't referenced in Maximum Overdrive.