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Night of the Comet (1984)
Who: Catherine Mary Stewart, Kelli Maroney, Robert Beltran, Geoffrey Lewis
What: Earth passes through a comet's tail, and most of the people directly exposed to the comet dust are turned to piles of red dust. Two sisters manage to survive the initial pass, but then encounter some partially-exposed humans who have been turned into talking zombies. The girls find a think tank working on a cure, but...
Availability: DVD and online on demand
Why: What ever happened to Catherine Mary Stewart? In 1984 she appeared in both this movie and The Last Starfighter, one of my favorite '80s movies, and then appeared in Weekend at Bernie's. All I knew as an early teenager back then was that she was a hot, feisty brunette, and this was a movie about hot chicks with guns fighting space-created zombies. There are various classes of zombies, from fast to slow and intelligent to dumb. The Night of the Comet zombies are basically equivalent to Monday morning office workers with a really bad hangover - the telltale symptom is their aversion to light. The movie is rated PG-13 so the gore level is mild, and there's a fair amount of '80s-style action humor. My favorite scene in this movie is when a zombie leader in a mall taunts Stewart by threatening: "Let's play a game! It's called Scary Noises." When Halley's Comet flew by in 1986, I probably wondered if there was some small chance of risk.

Bad Taste (1987)
Who: Peter Jackson
What: Aliens take over a small village in New Zealand with the intent to use humans as their own source of fast food. Four local guys decide to fight back, disguising themselves as the aliens before a big battle breaks out.
Availability: DVD rental
Why: Before Peter Jackson became the superstar director of the Lord of the Rings trilogy and King Kong, he directed Heavenly Creatures and Dead Alive. And before that, he directed Bad Taste. Bad Taste is appropriately named, because it's a very low budget horror-comedy filled with plenty of silly gore. It's unrated in the U.S., but if you liked the kind of gore in The Evil Dead, and the humor of Simon Pegg and Nick Frost in Shaun of the Dead, and The World's End, you'd probably be able to appreciate this movie. The aliens basically look like people wearing giant potato-shaped Halloween rubber masks. It contains one of my favorite very funny quick edits, as an alarmed sheep looks up just in time to see an errant rocket headed directly toward it.

House (1986)
Who: William Katt, George Wendt, Richard Moll, director Steve Miner
What: A horror-comedy about a haunted house. Katt plays a Vietnam veteran who has inherited his aunt's old house. He tries to work on a novel about his war experiences, but strange things happen to interrupt him, and eventually he realizes a door in the house leads to another dimension inhabited by a zombie that may have been responsible for the disappearance of his son before he went to war.
Availability: DVD, online on demand, and Netflix streaming
Why: What I enjoyed about this movie as a kid was, like Night of the Comet, the fact that it mixed comedy with horror. George Wendt of course was a regular on the TV series Cheers, and Richard Moll was one of the cast in Clue, though this wasn't as lightly comedic as those projects. Think of it more as a lighter version of Poltergeist (but still rated R). Director Steve Miner had previously directed the first two Friday the 13th sequels, but also went on to direct Soul Man and Forever Young.

Rawhead Rex (1986)
Who: David Dukes, Kelly Piper, director George Pavlou, writer Clive Barker
What: A religious archaeologist goes to Ireland to research some items at an old country church. While there, an ancient monster called Rawhead Rex is released from the ground and begins killing people. The researcher determines that something in the church holds the key to the pagan curse of Rawhead Rex.
Availability: You might need to buy this second-hand.
Why: To set the scene for this movie, first imagine the love child of the Predator and the sasquatch from Harry and the Hendersons. Rawhead Rex is a huge, ape-like monster. My favorite part about this horror is that although a lot of the attacks happen at night, you actually get to see Rex causing havoc right out in open daylight. That seems pretty rare for a horror movie, because it's not something that can be dismissed as just a shadow - no, he's *right* there on the lawn! The movie comes from one of Clive Barker's short stories (in Books of Blood) - he's probably best known for the Hellraiser franchise.

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