Night of the Comet

A comet the Earth passes through reduces anyone exposed to red dust, leaves a few as flesh-eating survivors, and spares two sisters who happened to sleep in steel-lined rooms.

Thom Eberhardt made a genuine oddity: an apocalypse comedy with two teenage girls as the leads, who respond to the end of the world by going shopping in an empty mall to a pop soundtrack, then having to deal with both zombies and a sinister government think-tank.

It is a clear ancestor of Buffy and every wisecracking-final-girl film since, and it treats its heroines as competent and funny rather than as victims.

Catherine Mary Stewart and Kelli Maroney are both excellent.

It is bright, cheap and much smarter than its premise, and the empty-Los-Angeles photography is truly eerie under the red sky.