Night of the Comet

There’s this comet, see, that’s going to pass real close to the Earth. It’s gonna be a real spectacular show, so everybody’s out in the streets with comet parties, to watch it all. Only, it drops this red dust all over everything, and people turn into red dust themselves, right in their clothes. (It might remind you of The Day of the Triffids, where a meteor shower blinded everyone who looked at it.) The next day, two Valley Girl sisters emerge from the places where they were sheltered (not intentionally; by accident) to find they are pretty much alone in the world. So what you do you if it’s up to you and one guy who happens along to re-start civilization? You go shopping!

What makes this good is that both girls got some training in firearms and kung fu and shit like that, so they aren’t knockovers for the occasional rotting zombie that comes after them. Zombies? Oh, right, forgot. People who were only partially exposed to the dust turned into walking dead. And there’s a government installation somewhere out in the desert that saw this coming, and realized that the only way they themselves can survive is to destroy the brains of the other survivors and transfuse their blood. Which makes them much worse than the zombies, IMHO, because they chose their evil path. And they’re just ordinary mad scientists, not Hitler’s SS. The banality of evil.

It’s got some good laughs, and good performances by Catherine Mary Stewart as the level-headed older sister, and Kelli Maroney as the airhead cheerleader. Neither of them spend any real time lamenting the passing of everyone they ever knew, since they hated their stepmother and their father had spent most of their childhoods overseas for one reason or another. So we can have fun with them. It has a budget of a few thousand dollars, and they make it all work pretty well.