I don’t generally care for zombie apocalypse movies. I also don’t much care for the “found family” trope in fiction. This is a zombie apocalypse movie that ends with a found family, so… but I’m getting ahead of myself.

A few weeks before Christmas, a comet is expected to pass near the earth, one that has not come by in 65 million years, since the extinction of the dinosaurs. People naturally see this as an occasion to party.

Except for Regina and Samantha Belmont, two sisters living in LA. Regina, the elder, spends the night with her boyfriend in a steel-lined movie projection booth, and Samantha hides out in a yard shed after a fight with the girls’ abusive step-mother, Doris.

As a result, both are spared the effects of the comet, which turns most of the population into dust, except for a few who are turned into zombies, one of which eats Regina’s boyfriend when he ventures out. Desperate to find any survivors, the two sisters head for a radio station that is still broadcasting. The DJ is nothing but a tape, but they meet Hector Gomez, another survivor who had spent the night in his truck.

When Samantha decides to start broadcasting her own announcements over the radio, the signal is picked up by a group of scientists who had prepared for the comet’s effects, and are looking to find survivors to bring back to their labs.

What follows are series of frightening experiences, from zombie police officers to sadistic zombie stock-boys when the two girls venture into what they think is an abandoned mall. Eventually, they reach the scientists’ lab—but even there, they are not safe from the hungry undead.

Eventually, Regina, Samantha, and Hector emerge from the apocalypse, along with two other young survivors. As Regina remarks, having taken on the role of matriarch in the newfound family: “The burden of civilization has fallen to us.”

That’s a basic, spoiler-free plot summary. But it omits the best character in the film, a rogue scientist named Audrey White, who is played exceptionally well in her brief screen time by Mary Woronov. She has only a few scenes, but they’re some of the most memorable ones in the film, and I would be remiss not to mention her performance.

So we’ve got zombie horror, a found-family ending… you would think I would hate this movie. But I don’t. I was actually really impressed by how well the film used its spare resource to focus on the core of the story. There is very little fat in this thing; it shows you just what you need to know to understand the characters and keeps moving along.

Then there’s the aesthetic, which is pure ’80s. The clothes, the hair, the cars, the music etc. As someone who never actually experienced the ’80s, I can’t say for certain, but I’m hard pressed to think of anything more aggressively ’80s than this. It’s a world for young people, and like another 1984 film declared: “tonight is what it means to be young.”

But part of being young is growing up, and that’s what Regina does over the course of the film. It’s never belabored or heavy-handed, but in a crisis, she goes from being an immature goof-off teenager to a capable and resourceful woman.

I never in a million years would have imagined I’d like a movie like this half as much as I do. It’s scary, it’s funny, it’s well-written, and above all else, it has real heart; not cheap sentimentality nor faux-sophisticated cynicism. Why can’t they make movies like this anymore?

Well, I think the answer lies in the words “low budget.” This typically signifies bad special effects or other negative qualities, but having a low budget forces talented artists to squeeze the very best out of what they’ve got. A big budget is wasted in the hands of a hack, and even truly skilled creative minds may be tempted to get lazy, to let the big special effects and gorgeous production values substitute for solid storytelling. Filmmakers with limited means have no such luxury.

Seriously, even if you hate zombie movies, I encourage you to watch this. Maybe it’s not for everyone, but by all logic it shouldn’t have been for me, and I love it, so you just never know.