As Earth prepares to pass through the tail of a comet – “Something not seen on Earth for 65 million years” says a narrator – celebrations commence for what promises to be a far out light show. 18-year-old Regina Belmont (Catherine Mary Stewart) is introduced whipping away on the arcade game Tempest during her shift at the old El Rey movie theatre on Wilshire.

Regina declines to participate in comet mania in order to spend the night in a steel reinforced projection booth with a nimrod co-worker (Michael Bowen). At home, her clueless 15-year-old sister Sam (Kelli Maroney) comes to blows with their insufferable stepmom, who has the girls on lockdown while their mercenary dad is away on “business” in Nicaragua.

The next morning, the good citizens of L.A. have been reduced to red dust by the comet. Regina wanders outside, where she encounters a freaked out zombie finishing up the nimrod for breakfast. She races home and is relieved to find Sam, who ran away and slept in a lawn shed the night of the comet. Slowly it dawns on the teenagers that there aren’t any people left.

Following the voice of a radio deejay, they head downtown to the station, but the only thing there is a reel to reel tape deck broadcasting the DJ’s show. As a consolation prize, they meet what appears to be the last man on earth, a good-looking trucker named Hector (Robert Beltran).

Hector informs the girls they aren’t exactly alone. Freaked out zombies are on the loose. Regina knows an armory, where their dad used to take Sam and her for target practice. Hector has his doubts the girls know anything about firearms. Regina scoffs at him, “A MAC-10 submachine gun was practically designed for housewives.”

While Hector makes a trip to San Diego to check on his family, the girls go on a shopping spree. The freaked out zombies who worked at the department store don’t extend much customer service, but government scientists (including Geoffrey Lewis and Mary Woronov) rescue the girls. Regina and Sam discover they’d be safer with the zombies.

Thom Eberhardt started as a director of serious social-issue documentaries for public television. He wrote and directed a horror feature called Sole Survivor that received some good reviews, but that no one saw. Trying to think up ideas for his next project, he asked his daughter’s friends what they would do if it was the end of the world, and they were the only ones left.

Eberhardt wrote down every dumb thing the kids said, and quickly finished the script for his next picture, Teenage Mutant Horror Comet Zombies. Retitled Night of the Comet, the $700,000 budgeted B-movie grossed $14 million in the U.S. It seemed to disappear after that. The DVD didn’t even materialize until March 2007.

I love this movie. It falls short of being the best of its kind ever, but is one of the lost gems of the 1980s, a brilliant blend of comedy and science fiction. If Eberhardt had gone over-the-top and made a valley girl spoof, the results would have been awful. If he’d taken the material dead serious – as the producers were urging him to – the result also would have been forgettable.

The script is unique in that it mines the apocalypse for great comic relief. It gives us a taste of what it would be like to survive the end of the world, as when Sam laments a guy she had a crush on is now dead. Then the movie becomes funny, as when she goes on the air and lowers the legal drinking age to 10. Not many movies move between genres as deftly as this one does.

Night of the Comet was cast to perfection. Kelli Maroney became the dream girl of many a boy as the MAC-10 totting pep squad blonde, but Catherine Mary Stewart’s character is my type of heroine; versed in Superman comic books, sleeps with the wrong guys, proficient with automatic weapons. In other words, complex. Robert Beltran and Mary Woronov are terrific, in particular, during a beautifully written scene at the radio station when their characters meet suddenly and part ways quickly.

The pop soundtrack produced by Don Perry and Bob Summers – who would supervise the music for Girls Just Want To Have Fun – is abominable, but it doesn’t matter. The movie is written and cast so well, the camera setups and effects look good, and it’s a lot of fun. Thom Eberhardt was never able to balance comedy and drama as effectively as he did here.