TERROR TRAIN: Blu-ray reissue (Astral-Bellvue Pathe, 1980) Scorpion Releasing
Buried somewhere beneath all the camp acting and a
screenplay by T.Y. Drake, brutally lacking in any sort of continuity is Donald
Spottiswoode’s undernourished attempt at directing his first feature film: Terror
Train (1980) – a thinly veiled, weak premised fright-fest designed to
capitalize on the B-budget horror movie craze, itself prompted by the
phenomenal success of John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978). In fact, the
film’s executive producer Daniel Grodnik even had the guts to telephone
Carpenter’s producer, Debra Hill beforehand to inform her that he was doing ‘Halloween
on a train’. With all due respect to Grodnik, he was reaching way beyond
his capabilities – either as a producer or writer; even as his initial concept
for Terror Train was immediately snatched up by producer, Harold
Greenberg. Terror Train is the sort of ‘horror’ movie that has a lot of
opportunities to scare the hell out of you, but only one direction to go if the
30-second revile of seeing a lot of half-naked twenty-something’s splayed and
sprayed with red dye #9 turns your crank. Thanks to cinematographer, John
Alcott (who had only just lensed Barry Lyndon for Stanley Kubrick) the picture
has something of a seedy and foreboding visual flair, amplified by its claustrophobic
interiors, and also the added cache of having ‘scream queen’, Jamie Lee Curtis
as, ostensibly, the heroine of this piece. Taking full advantage of a Canadian
film tax credit (whereby for every dollar spent by the production company, the
Canadian government puts up four to match it), Grodnik and Greenberg plunge
headstrong into ‘slasher’ flick territory;, Alcott hampered by their insistence
to use a real moving train for much of the shoot. Working in such confined
spaces lends Terror Train what little suspense the production has. Alas,
not even Alcott’s lurid mood lighting can mask the film’s more glaring narrative
oversights.
I recall quite vividly being smuggled into the theater by a friend and his older brother who had an even older cousin working as an
usher at the local Odeon back in 1980. I was nine then and with a limited
understanding and appreciation of cinema in general that basically included a
handful of Disney movies – cartoon and live -action - some Abbott and Costello
and Three Stooges reruns, and, a regular diet of severely edited C-grade
creature features on the boob tube every Saturday afternoon. Yeah, I know…where
were my parents? Actually, they thought I had gone with that same friend to play.
Technically, I did. But I digress. To suggest Terror Train left an indelible
mark then is an understatement. In fact, I do not think I slept for a couple of
days after seeing it, and, absolutely cringed when it was announced by my
father we were going to take ‘the train’ to visit his sister in Brampton later
that same year. With its obligatory nudie shots and mounting carnage, Terror
Train all seemed very adult to me - then, frightening and strangely,
deliciously tawdry. I just knew mom and dad would not approve and that added
something to my viewing experience. Remember, I was nine! But what scares us as
kids rarely has the same effect once we become adults…or that is to say, it has
to be a damn clever horror film to work its magical fright on us post-puberty.
Sadly, Terror Train lacks such good judgment. It isn’t anything like a
‘good’ horror movie. Instead it veers into horrid schlock, brutalizing the
audience, although without even the guts to actually show us anything except
several mutilated bodies once they have already been butchered.
I don’t know how savvier horror fan feels about all
this, but revisiting Terror Train after an absence of many years left me
cold - and not in a sweat, or suffering from some voyeuristic chills because of
its frigid Montreal locales. It’s just tacky and tasteless and really lowbrow –
a movie that could have only appealed to a child of the seventies; a
decade where such debase grit, grunge and gruesomeness were simply par for the
course of most movie-going experiences. Our story begins at a wintry frat
party for a bunch of med students. Doc Manley (Hart Bochner), of the chest-thumping
jock stereotype ilk, sets up mama’s boy, Kenny Hampson (Derek McKinnon) into
thinking he is going to get some action with college babe, Alan Maxwell (Jamie
Lee Curtis). Using his own girlfriend, Mitchy (Sandee Currie) as a lure, poor
old Kenny hurries up to a darkened dorm, appropriately lit by flashing ‘caution’
signs. Take the hint! Alana’s standing behind the bed, beckoning Kenny to crawl
in next to…well, she’s not quite sure. But not even she has fathomed Doc and
his cohorts would be so ruthless as to have stolen a real female corpse,
already dissected, from a nearby mortuary, planting it beneath the sheets. In
the half-lit room, moodily lit with twinkling Christmas lights, it all looks
very sexy…until. Discovering the body after he is already half-naked and one of
its half-rotting arms detaches, throws Kenny’s already fragile psyche over the edge.
He gets tangled in the gauzy overhead drapes of the four-poster bed and
collapses in a heap as other frat pledges enjoy a sadistic chuckle at his
expense. Alana is horrified. Three years later, she is about to be very, very sorry.
For this is the night Alana’s boyfriend, Mo (Timothy
Webber) has decided to surprise her and all their alumni with a New Year’s Eve
train trip as part of their going away graduation present. But what is, at
first, promised as a night of fun-filled adolescent debaucheries, quickly turns
deadly when friend, Ed (Howard Busgang), after entertaining his fellow
dead-heads on the platform with some truly terrible jokes while disguised as a
demonic looking Groucho Marx, fails to get aboard. Actually, he has been prematurely
gutted with a magician’s sword – the first of the casualties - left on the
tracks to have his head run over as the train pulls out of station. The killer,
now disguised as Groucho, stalks a drunken Mitchy next, but decides to derail
his ambitions in order to Ginsu another classmate, Jackson (Anthony Sherwood),
who is dressed as a lizard man. Jackson is repeatedly stabbed inside one of the
bathrooms. Meanwhile, in the dining car, Ken, the magician (David Copperfield)
is busy doing rather pedestrian card tricks and disappearing dimes to impress
the ladies. Alana thinks he is cute, but is unimpressed to learn Mo merely paid
for their train trip. The idea for it came from Doc. After participating in
Doc’s last great idea, that sent Kenny to the asylum, Alana swore she would
never agree to anything he planned ever again.
But it’s too late. The vintage locomotive and its
train cars are already hurdling across a barren and snow-covered countryside
with no radio contact available. The train’s conductor, Carne (Ben Johnson)
discovers Jackson’s remains. But when he returns with Charley the brakeman
(Steve Michaels) a few minutes later, he is astonished to see the lifeless
lizard man stir and all of the blood spatters miraculously cleaned up. Assuming
he has been part of an elaborate hoax, Carne allows the lizard man to leave the
bathroom stall; a mistake, since the killer has already disposed of Jackson’s
body (we’re never told how or where) and assumed his costumed disguise. Mitchy
gets hers next, throat slashed inside her upper birth. Alana discovers the body
and is consoled by Carne who takes her to another car to calm down. In the
meantime, the rest of the unsuspecting crowd are enjoying the magician’s act
inside the dining car. It is unclear what happens next, but Mo, who has been
seated next to Doc while viewing the performance, suddenly keels over into
Doc’s lap, his chest covered in blood. The usually callous Doc is reduced to a
frantic pile of unhinged goo, racing through the train with Mo’s body in his arms.
Eventually, he slumps over in the lower birth under Mitchy’s corpse with Carne
and Alana arriving to comfort him.
The emergency cord is pulled but the train doesn’t
stop. Carne rushes to the locomotive to discover it unattended. We never do
learn what has become of Charlie. Carne stops the train and orders everyone
off. As the class president (Greg Swanson) begins to take inventory of who is
left, Carne quickly ushers Alana into a private car. Alana, who has had time to
figure things out with the aid of a yearbook, decides Ken the magician must be
Kenny the killer, the boy they were all responsible for sending to the asylum
with their prank. Carne agrees. He confines everyone to a single car, isolating
Ken, the magician in another containing his props. Doc panics and after kicking
Alana out of her safe room, locks himself inside it instead. Unfortunately, Doc
has also barricaded himself in with the killer who wastes no time decapitating
and stashing Doc’s head and body in a pull-down upper birth. Alana begins to
have second thoughts about Ken. Sneaking into his prop room, she finds the
magician crammed inside one of his escape boxes, pierced by a succession of
swords. Racing to the conductor’s car, Alana is stalked by the killer who
reveals himself, at long last, as Kenny. After several attempts to murder
Alana, Kenny is instead killed by Carne who sends him flying out of an open
door and to his death, plummeting off a bridge into some icy frigid waters
below.
Terror Train is so obvious in its premise, so transparent and one-dimensional
in its narrative that it is virtually impossible to appreciate it as an adult.
No one but Kenny could be the killer and – big surprise – no one else
but Kenny is. There really does not seem
to be much point to the murders that occur except to say that they do, and,
with increasing regularity and grisliness that has the opposite effect on the
audience. We are not particularly challenged, surprised or even shocked when
another body turns up, so much as keeping score of Kenny’s kills. Jamie Lee
Curtis phones in this performance. It isn’t really her fault. She is given the
most unimaginative and sparse dialogue; forced to play pouty for the first
third, and utterly shell-shocked for the latter two. However, unlike her
performance in Halloween, the fear in her eyes this time around
generates little, except tedium for the exercise of being everyone’s favorite ‘scream
queen’.
Created in the wake of Halloween, Terror
Train never comes anywhere near replicating its level of bone-chilling
suspense and fear. Winning no awards for originality, Terror Train has
received a new 2K scan from Scorpion Releasing, and derived from the original
internegative with additional restoration efforts applied. This is a definite
upgrade from the 2012 Blu-ray released via Shout Factory. Don’t expect
perfection. Owing to its low-budget origins, Terror Train definitely
sports the look of a B-grade slice n’ dice, shot quick n’ dirty. Some source-related
artifacts, speckling, scratches, etc. remain baked into this presentation. Overall,
image clarity has crisped up from the old Shout! release and there is some good
texturing in close-ups. Colors are also richer here. The original Blu looked
faded, dull and muddy. Grain structure is preserved and, predictably, is very
heavy, though nevertheless, film-like. The 5.1 DTS is strident, but adequate,
given the limitations of the original mono mix. Dialogue still sounds slightly
muffled and the SFX lack spatial spread. Let’s be honest, there is only so much
you can do with vintage audio. Extras include a 17 min. interview with Roger
Spottiswoode who shares some remarkable recall on the making of this movie.
There’s also 6-min. with Judith Rascoe, and a pair of 12-min. reflections, separately,
from producer, Daniel Grodnik, and Don Carmoody. We get 11-min. with production
designer, Glenn Bydwell and 8-min. with composer, John Mills-Cockell, plus – a stills
gallery, TV spots, and a theatrical trailer. All in all, this is an
exceptionally comprehensive coming together of the clan. I really cannot think
of anything more one would wish to know about this middling slasher flick that
never quite lived up to Spottiswoode’s aspirations to create another Halloween.
If you are a fan of Terror Train, you’ll want to snatch this one up.
Despite some inherent flaws in its video master, we get superior image quality
and better extras this time around. Judge and buy accordingly.
FILM RATING (out of 5 – 5 being the best)
2.5
VIDEO/AUDIO
3.5
EXTRAS
5+
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