#65: Night of the Comet (Thom Eberhardt, 1984)

Many of my favorite films have something timeless about them. These artistic masterworks transcend their particular time and place and resonate as something essentially and permanently human. However, I also love films that belong to a specific time and place. Movies can show us how certain years and decades looked and felt, especially those films shot on location. We can see how people moved, talked, looked. What their hairstyles were, how they dressed, how they held their cigarettes, what they joked about, what they drank. We can see the cars, hear the music, see the landscapes and cityscapes and prevailing and countervailing attitudes of each year in history since 1895. Pioneering French film archivist, preservationist, and programmer Henri Langlois got at this when he said it was equally important to preserve every porno movie, not because of any cinematic importance, but because the indoor settings of most porn films provided an excellent filmed record of bourgeois furniture styles.

Night of the Comet, besides being a thoroughly entertaining horror/sci-fi/comedy hybrid, is an excellent record of the year of our lord 1984. I want to put forth the idea that 1984, pop-culturally speaking, was the most 1980s-esque year of the 1980s. Most of what we think about when we think about the 1980s happened in 1984. Look at some of the records that came out in 1984: Prince's Purple Rain, Madonna's Like a Virgin, Van Halen's 1984, Bruce Springsteen's Born in the U.S.A., Run-D.M.C.'s first album, Cyndi Lauper's She's So Unusual (technically released in late 1983, but the songs were all over the radio and MTV in 1984). In indie rock circles, a bunch of landmark albums came out in 1984 as well, including R.E.M.'s Reckoning, Husker Du's Zen Arcade, Minutemen's Double Nickels on the Dime and The Smiths' first album. Michael Jackson's Thriller, released in 1982, was still the best-selling album of the year in 1984. Look at the top 10 highest grossing movies of 1984, nearly each one era-defining (not always in terms of quality, though this list is much better than any from recent years):
1. Ghostbusters
2. Beverly Hills Cop
3. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
4. Gremlins
5. The Karate Kid
6. Police Academy
7. Footloose
8. Romancing the Stone
9. Purple Rain
10. Star Trek III: The Search for Spock
A bit lower on the radar, but still culturally influential, and released in 1984: Repo Man, This Is Spinal Tap, the Talking Heads concert film Stop Making Sense, and Jarmusch's Stranger than Paradise.
On television, The Cosby Show and Miami Vice debuted, The A-Team started its second season, Family Ties started its third season, and Simon & Simon started its fourth season.

So, yes, as I was saying before I got into the minutiae of 1984 pop culture, Night of the Comet provides an excellent historical record of 1980s life. Set in that most 1980s of cities in that most 1980s of states, Los Angeles, California (particularly the Valley), the film begins on the night that a comet is about to pass extremely close to Earth. There are two factions when it comes to the comet -- those who believe the comet is a harbinger of the end of the world and those who want to put on their most 1980s of outfits and have a kick-ass Friday night comet party. (These scenes capitalize on two 1980s obsessions: Halley's Comet was two years away, and many of us thought nuclear war with the Soviet Union was imminent. Guess what else came out in 1984? Red Dawn.) Unfortunately, the apocalyptos were correct. The comet turns everyone outdoors into red dust, instantly. Those who were in some kind of shelter and indirectly exposed to the comet have it even worse. They are slowly turning into red dust, but before they do so, they spend several days as bloodthirsty, crazed zombies. There are a small group of lucky survivors. The comet's rays can't penetrate steel, so anyone who was enclosed in a steel building during showtime is gold. This includes two sisters, played by Catherine Mary Stewart and Kellie Maroney. Stewart, besides being a Asteroids whiz, works at a movie theater and spent the night in the projection booth, sleeping with the projectionist. The booth is made of steel, per fire code from the old days of exploding nitrate film, so her and the projectionist are good (at least, until he gets wasted by a zombie) and Maroney spent the night in a steel shed after getting into a fistfight with her stepmother and running away from home. The sisters reunite and realize they are seemingly the only two people left in Los Angeles, and possibly the world. They decamp to a local radio station that is still operating because the DJ patter is all canned. The station has plenty of purple neon lights because it is 1984 to the extreme.

Most reviews of the movie point out that our two survivors are Valley Girls. This is not accurate. They are from the Valley, but they don't speak in Valley Girl lingo. There is no mention of gagging with a spoon, gnarly, like for sure, or wow. They do like boys and shopping, but they are smart and adept with submachine guns and martial arts. They learned the art of weaponry and ass-kicking from their father, an ex-Green Beret who, at the time of the comet, is fighting the Sandinistas.
Night of the Comet maintains a high level of kick-ass entertainment throughout, as the girls fight off killer zombies, readjust to post-apocalyptic life, and meet up with other survivors. Things get even more complicated when an underground bunker in the desert full of scientists with conflicting motives enters the picture. One of these scientists is played by the great Mary Woronov, a one-time Warhol Factory scenester, who is in nearly every classic B-movie of the 1970s and 1980s. Fortunately, the movie also contains a looting-of-department-store musical montage set to a horrible cover version of Cyndi Lauper's "Girls Just Want To Have Fun." The rights to the original must have been too expensive.

Writer/director Eberhardt, who later directed Gross Anatomy and Captain Ron, has a knack for striking imagery here that I'm guessing he probably didn't take advantage of in Captain Ron. There is something haunting about human-made landscapes empty of humans, and the numerous scenes of abandoned suburban homes, buildings, cars, clothes, and swimming pools, with automatic sprinkler systems continuing to do their work, are eerily effective. The zombies look great, too, and since these particular zombies are still-living humans, they can talk, drive, and plot crazy schemes.
In short, this movie is awesome. 1984 4 Life!

#64: The Night Flier (Mark Pavia, 1997)

I haven't read anything by Stephen King for 19 years. That makes me sound old, but I'm only slightly less fresh than the morning dew. Come on, people. Over the course of Thanksgiving break in eighth grade, November 1990, I read King's then-new collection of four novellas, Four Past Midnight, and that was that. I remember enjoying the book, but I also remember thinking that I had finally read enough King for one lifetime. My tastes were changing. I was turning away from King, Clive Barker, and Peter Straub, and turning toward the average young male misfit's canon of serious teenage literature: Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, Kurt Vonnegut, Tom Robbins, Charles Bukowski, and biographies of Hendrix, The Doors, Led Zeppelin, and John Lennon. My musical tastes were changing, too. Instead of Metallica, Motley Crue, and Whitesnake, I was spending my time with Jane's Addiction, Fishbone, Soundgarden, Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Living Colour. Not that much of an improvement, really, but I was taking my first baby steps toward my current aesthetic, which is loving every type of thing that exists but trying to be discerning within those types. My active interest in Stephen King comprised only five years of my life, but it seemed much longer. Between the ages of 9 and 13, I read about 75 kabillion King books. Most of these memories involve sitting in a car, for some reason. I remember reading The Stand in the car on the way to a family vacation in South Dakota. I remember reading The Dark Half in the car on the way to Colorado to visit my uncle. I remember sitting in my parents' parked car reading Christine in the summer heat while listening to top 40 radio from a boombox near a concession stand while my mother played in a tennis tournament. I also remember all the bicycle trips to the public library to stock up on King novels and pedaling them home in a paper bag draped across the handlebars so no one my age spotted me with books. Once branded a "reader," your playground cachet plummeted. In high school, on a band trip to Los Angeles, the teachers scheduled some R&R at a huge mall in Orange County. Back on the bus at the end of the day, a girl from my class saw some of my shopping bags and asked me, "Why do you have a bag from the bookstore?" "I bought some books," I said. "Why?" she asked. She wasn't being mean. She was honest to god baffled. Bill Hicks has a similar routine in one of his acts, and I'm sure his story is true, too. Some people, if they don't know, you just can't tell them.

Anyway, flash back to 1988. Two years before I lost the taste for Stephen King completely, I was still in the midst of King mania. I checked out the horror anthology Prime Evil from the library of a nearby much larger town, having tapped out the horror fiction from my own hometown's library. The first story in the anthology was a brand new novella from King called "The Night Flier." Having sampled some of King's writing again this morning, I am reluctant to admit that although he is an accessible and likable storyteller, he is also a pretty godawful hack writer. Another childhood hero destroyed. Thanks a lot, cardiac arrest and literary evidence. Anyway, King may be no William Gaddis, but he came up with a pretty nifty story idea involving a vampire serial killer, private planes, and tiny, isolated airports. I loved the story in 1988, and even though that love belongs solely to 1988, at least somebody made a movie out of it. Movies can turn schlock like this into something entertaining and fun in ways literature can't.

The only feature film directed by Mark Pavia, The Night Flier stars George Clooney's more attractive cousin, Miguel Ferrer (what a time he would have in Shelbyville), an actor I wish was used more often. I love this guy. He plays a great charismatic asshole. I love him in the Twin Peaks TV show and movie and in Robocop. He plays Richard Dees, a hotshot reporter for a Weekly World News/National Enquirer/proto-TMZ hybrid called Inside View. He's a completely unlikable asshole. I always like characters like that in movies, especially if they're played by Miguel Ferrer. The paper has just hired a fresh-faced upstart with that supremely annoying mixture of naivete and ambition, Katherine Blair. She's played well by Julie Entwisle, in one of her only two film roles and her only non-bit part role. Both her and director Pavia disappeared from films entirely after this movie, but the consolation prize is that they married each other.

Though Dees is the paper's star reporter, he's been slipping recently, so the paper's weaselly editor assigns the story of The Night Flier, a serial killer with a private plane who lands in rural airports and kills whoever's on duty, to both Dees and Blair, playing them off each other. This part of the story is a well-worn cliche, as is King's heavy-handed comparison of the vampire and the tabloid reporter, hammered home in a speech toward the end. (They're both bloodsuckers, get it? What a profound observation.) Pavia also isn't the most exciting visual stylist in the world. But he's not unnecessarily flashy, either, and he doesn't trick up the visuals in the fashionable modern sense, which is nice, because if he did trick up the visuals in the style of the times, he would have completely fucked up the movie.
This is not a great movie, by any stretch, but it's well-acted, nicely told, and fun. The special effects are convincing (no CGI, thank god), and the idea of a murderous vampire flying an all-black Cessna fills me with glee. I liked it.
The Night Flier experienced a limited, unsuccessful theatrical run after debuting as a TV movie on HBO. Many far more terrible King adaptations have enjoyed major theatrical runs for much longer.