Night of the Comet

Thom Eberhardt's delightful, low-budget, sci-fi horror comedy is about a comet that swings by Earth eleven days before Christmas and turns most people into either red dust or zombie cannibal mutants. Fortunately, two incredibly cute Southern California sisters (Catherine Mary Stewart from The Last Starfighter and Kelli Maroney, who had a small role in Fast Times at Ridgemont High) somehow survive this event. The two teens team up with a pleasant young truck driver, played by Robert Beltran (Raoul of Eating Raoul), to figure out what happened while also enjoying having the entire mall (and the entire city) pretty much to themselves. The sibling rivalry between the two sisters is fun, as is the fact that their dad taught them how to fight and use automatic weapons when they were kids, so their ability to handle themselves in a post-apocalyptic world plays as both humorous and even kind of credible. We get nice, unexpected supporting turns by Mary Woronov and Geoffrey Lewis, and pretty much everyone else who shows up later in the movie is entertaining. There are also memorable lines of dialogue like Michael Bowen's "I'm not crazy, I just don't give a fuck!" The movie is basically an earlier version of 28 Days Later but with female protagonists, zero pretensions, a beautiful low-budget celluloid look, and a third act that doesn't completely suck like the last third of all Alex Garland and Danny Boyle movies.