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The charming joke is that the Armageddon promised by the President turns out to be a shopping spree rudely interrupted by zombies. Los Angeles at Christmastime sports a burnt-orange patina that can only be enhanced by the appearance of a primordial comet, humanity expect a lightshow and get turned into piles of red dust that are washed away by a downpour. The heroine (Catherine Mary Stewart) is a lanky usherette introduced lost in the glow of a lobby arcade game, she escapes decimation by taking refuge in the projection room of the El Rey Theater. Hellish skies in the morning ("Ugh, bad smog," shrugs the survivor), streets vacant but for mutated foes feasting on her beau, "I hate days that start like this." Machine gun-toting lasses, she and her cheerleader sister (Kelli Maroney), touching base with the hunky trucker (Robert Beltran) in the abandoned radio station. The voice of authority comes from a sinister gaggle of military scientists (which include Mary Woronov and Geoffrey Lewis), the voice of the generation comes from a horde of stockroom wonks upgraded to New Wave ghouls: "I'm not crazy, I just don't give a fuck!" Thom Eberhardt relishes the satirical quality of this teenage wasteland, and foregrounds inane Eighties standbys (smoky neon, synthesizers, musical montages) with amusingly low-fi effects. MacDougall's The World, the Flesh and the Devil and Oboler's The Bubble are marked forerunners, the Romero connection has been noted, Michael Bowen's presence provides a handy link to Valley Girl. The New Family at the close is not free from "the burden of civilization" (cf. Stagecoach), Cox's Repo Man the same year is an illuminating counterpart. With Sharon Farrell, Peter Fox, John Achorn, and Ivan E. Roth.
--- Fernando F. Croce |