Night of the Comet

This is a terrifically witty, refreshingly unpretentious science-fiction film with the least likely and most likable heroines in memory. All the performers are excellent, especially Maroney, who can veer from petulant to heroic in the blink of an eye. Read full review

While it would be unduly dismissive to write off Night of the Comet as a cult film merely by association, a good bit of its ancillary charm is obviously owing to its resonant casting choices: Reuniting Beltran and Woronov in the wake of Paul Bartel’s blistering black comedy Eating Raoul adds extra spice to the one longish scene they share. Read full review

Night Of The Comet borrows freely from everything from The Omega Man to Romero’s zombie films to Repo Man, but it never borrows so heavily as to feel like a rip-off of anything. Read full review

A good-natured, end-of- the-world B-movie, written and directed by Thom Eberhardt, a new film maker whose sense of humor augments rather than upstages the mechanics of the melodrama. Read full review

Night of the Comet is a successful pastiche of numerous science fiction films, executed with an entertaining, tongue-in-cheek flair that compensates for its absence in originality. Read full review

B-movies are the great anchor of American film. They're what we do best. And Night of the Comet, like Blood Beach and The Howling before it, honors the form even as it fails to transcend it. Things go bump in the night, characters exchange improbable dialogue and a good time is had by all even as the world comes to an end. [28 Nov 1994, p.B6]

A cheaply made science-fiction movie that enters the atmosphere without ever igniting. Read full review

Suspecting that all this plus the cheerleaders might fail to excite, the film-makers also pack in twenty songs. Read full review

Eberhardt's hand isn't sure and Night of the Comet wobbles in its orbit. [16 Nov 1984, p.21]

This is a movie which makes its viewers feel ripped-off just for expending a snicker. Camp, satire, sci-fi all have their own rules, rigorous ones at that, but Night of the Comet violates even the codes of trash. Point of view shots point to the wrong views, the cutting is as blunt as stone and the way Eberhardt bleeds the sex appeal out of the sex is the film's only real vision of the end of the world. [16 Nov 1984]