An enjoyable throwback to 1950s science fiction, which has gained a nostalgic glow of its own for encapsulating 1980s archetypes: the big-hair teenage heroines see the end of the world as a great excuse to hit the mall for a shopping spree to the tune of ‘Girls Just Want to Have Fun’.
After a plot device filched from The Day of the Triffids gets rid of all the spoilsports in the world (ie: parents), a few red filters and some ferocious but tacky zombies turn the streets and suburbs of Los Angeles into an alien landcsape. It falls into the movie buff in-joke genre beloved of John Landis and Joe Dante, with a heroine who survives the wiping out of humanity because her boyfriend is locked inside a cinema pirating a print of It Came From Outer Space and finds room in the cast for Roger Corman/Andy Warhol icon Mary Woronov as a suicidal femme fatale who brings a touch of melancholy to the film. In the villainy department, the film is well served by eyeballs-akimbo Geoffrey Lewis as an evil scientist who wants to exterminate the survivors.
Its mix of black humour and horror is exemplified by a sequence with a pair of mutating nurses chattering about how much they like working with children as they prepare to asphyxiate a couple of kids whose blood they want to drain – which sets up a darkly gruesome punchline, ‘gone to see Santa Claus’.
Director Thom Eberhardt seemed to be a coming name, but after the Sherlock Holmes parody Without a Clue slipped to TV movies and series episodes.