Format: Streaming video from Hoopla on Fire!
Halloween changed the horror movie industry in a lot of ways, and popularized the slasher subgenre. It also created the scream queen career of Jamie Lee Curtis. It had some real negative effects as well. For a few years in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, you couldn’t swing a dead cat without hitting a teen slasher movie that put her in the role of the final girl or at least final girl-adjacent. Sometimes, you got something fun like The Fog or Road Games. Sometimes you got derivative garbage like Terror Train.
In the nearly 16(!) years I have written this blog, I have watched a lot of garbage. I’ve seen a lot of embarrassing movies, some of which have been forced on me by others as challenges, some from my old podcast, and more than a few from various lists I’ve pursued. There are clearly worse movies than Terror Train that I have watched and written about, but there aren’t a lot that feel this lazy. That, more than anything is what is disappointing about this movie. Terror Train is unquestionably not a good movie, but it’s a far greater sin that it feels like it was written over a weekend by someone who was simultaneously distracted by the television.
We need to first set up our murdering psychopath, so we’re going to start at a college party where a group of pre-med freshman pledges to a fraternity are essentially told that they all have to lose their virginity on the night of the party. A couple of the elders in the fraternity, most specifically Doc (Hart Bochner), plans a joke on a nebbish-y pledge named Kenny (Derek MacKinnon). Kenny is told that he has a willing partner waiting for him, that partner being Alana (Jamie Lee Curtis) but what he actually finds in the bed is a corpse. Naturally, Kenny loses his mind and is hospitalized.
Three years later, as graduation looms for Alana, her boyfriend Mo (Timothy Webber) and other members of the fraternity plan a costume party on a train over New Year’s Eve. For whatever reason, there’s a magician on board (played by what looks like a pre-pubescent David Copperfield), and naturally we’re going to start having bodies dropping almost immediately. Since everyone is in a costume and plenty of people are in masks, it’s a pretty good way to keep the look of the killer changing and to keep everyone on the train unaware of what is going on.
That’s really the problem with Terror Train, or at least one of the problems with it. There are some ideas here that could work in a movie that wasn’t written this poorly and that had a more competent group of extras and second-tier actors. You have a cast of people trapped in something that will be virtually impossible for them to leave—even if the killer is coming for you, jumping off a moving train in the middle of winter isn’t a good idea. You’ve got a killer who could (but doesn’t ) dump bodies off the train easily and change appearance just as easily because of the costumes, but what we get are dumb people, stupid practical jokes, and a complete lack of awareness of everyone on board that anything is happening until pretty much the end.
Another real problem with Terror Train, one that I freely admit is my hang up and not specifically anyone else’s is that everyone in this film is kind of awful. All of the characters with the exception of the guys who actually work on the train (the conductor, played by Ben Johnson, is the only character worth rooting for) are terrible people. Even Alana, who is more or less our main character, is kind of spineless and wishy-washy, easily manipulated, and sorry for what she did to poor Kenny only in retrospect. Watching these people get bumped off isn’t specifically a pleasure, but I didn’t feel that bad for most of them.
This does have a sort of cult following and even a remake from a few years ago, and the part of me that acknowledges that it has fans also thinks that it’s a sort of “so bad it’s good” kind of thing. I think pretty much everyone involved in this knew they were going through the motions. Seriously, the entire cast looks bored.
Is the remake any good? Since it has substantially worse reviews in general, I would guess that no one bothered to learn from the mistakes of this one.
Why to watch Terror Train: The bones of a good movie are in here.
Why not to watch: The bones of a good movie is all we have.
No comments:
Post a Comment