Terror Train
Special holiday / childhood flashback / inaugural edition!
Yes folks, it's that time of the year for special treats. For having that extra cookie, that one more piece of fudge, the oh-hell-one-for-the-road-can't-hurt martini. In other words, it's time to revel in self-abuse because come January tenth or fifteenth or so, we'll all be back in the gym, eatin' South Beach and basically hewing the line.
One of three slashers JLC was in that year alone.
Basically hewing the line. Yeah, I'll clean up my physical diet, but psychically the poison parade will continue unabated. Remember, I watch bad movies so you don't have to. I take the punishment and pass the savings on to you. In that spirit, I'm announcing the inauguration of my new series: Instantly Regrettable. Wherein I trawl through the bottom of Netflix's Instant-Watch barrel, finding only the choicest muddy bottom-feeders and subjecting my eyeballs to the fail.
Seeing as how this is a serious endeavor, I've decided to ease into it a tad and kick off the series by revisiting an old fave from my childhood: 1980's scream-queen Canuxploitation classic, Terror Train, directed by the hilariously named Roger Spottiswoode. This is the real deal, folks: Jaime Lee Curtis herself is in this, not some second-rate imitator. Ben Johnson (the very definition of 'venerable') and David Copperfield round out the star power.
So much for the film's strengths. The rest of the film is comprehensible only if you understand the period's slasher cinema, which is to say, if you were an adolescent boy in the late 70s-early 80s. Or rather, if you paid any attention to the string of Halloween knock-offs that sought to progressively out-do each other in the wacky-kill department. (A progression whose absurd apogee was predicted and satirized in 1981's Student Bodies). The vaporously thin plot centers around a group of frat boys and their girlfriends celebrating their college graduation with a rail-bound, costumed bacchanalia. Unfortunately for our characters, they all played a part in a frat prank gone wrong three years earlier, in which a timid pledge named Kenny was sexually humiliated with a corpse. Kenny was driven insane by the prank, and now he's back for revenge. There's no doubt whatsoever that Kenny is the killer; the film tries to build tension via the masquerade. Since everyone is masked, Kenny can hide in plain sight, a conceit that the film milks dry.
Curtis stars as Alana, who as a student was suckered into pranking Kenny by her easily duped boyfriend, Mo. Mo is clearly second fiddle to the frat's charismatic natural leader and prank mastermind, Doc (Hart Bochner). ( I'll skip ahead a bit and let you know that one of the film's most entertaining sequences features Doc in a hysterical fit, screeching like a wildcat. A feminine, feminine wildcat). Alana has always (PLOT POINT) been remorseful for mindfucking Kenny, but Doc and Mo are just too gangsta to care.
As her brethren start to croak, Alana, assisted by the train's conductor Carne (Johnson) tries to find out who Kenny is. Their suspicions immediately fall on The Magician, played by David Copperfield's hair—no, I'm mistaken, the man himself is under that fountain of hair. Copperfield was hired specifically for the party (because nothing says frat party like a magic act) along with an overdosed-on-quaaludes funk band whose guitarist totally looks like Janice from the Muppet Show. Copperfield's act provides the film's only true glance at "entertainment", and only partly because Copperfield is a gifted magician. His sleight-of-hand, while impressive, takes a back seat to his act's resemblance to Gob Bluth's. If you're an Arrested Development fan you simply have to watch this movie, for the magic show alone.
While Curtis and Johnson seek to track down the killer, the bodies start to pile up, in more and more absurd ways. Indeed, the kills, while certainly tame by today's standards, really take the cake. They are ludicrously improbable; all the more so when you recall all this is supposed to be happening on a moving train. After about an hour, the tedium sets in, but at just over 90 minutes, it doesn't drag on too long. If you sit this thing out to the end, you'll be treated to several tiny little bizarre pleasures, none of which are substantial in their own right, but which add up to a worthwhile bad movie experience. Watch for the casual drug use (a sure sign it was filmed in '79) like the scene where a student offers a conductor a joint (an offer readily accepted). In fact, a little chronic is advised to help you through this thing.
My Bloody Valentine (2009)
I'm not a fan of gritty reboots of my childhood horror franchises, as they've been mostly really disappointing (the 2003 remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre being a remarkable exception). But having only vague memories of the 1981 Canuxploitation film My Bloody Valentine, it's not as if I had any psychic territory to defend. How bad could it be, anyway? It's not as if there's some kind of clue indicating that you're in for a really bad... oh, wait...
Gimmickry, thy name is 3-D
This is the one in 3-D, innit? Crap.
3-D slashers are particularly weak. The third Friday the 13th was the second-weakest of the bunch, and that was only beaten out by the truly abominable fifth movie. So a gritty reboot in 3-D is looking especially painful. Settle in and get comfortable, 'cos this is gonna hurt.
Actually, MBV 3-D starts out strong. This is one movie that comes out swinging, I'll give it that much. I counted fourteen corpses in the first fifteen minutes, and I'm told that the true count (for those paying close attention) is twenty-two. It's all kinda of confusing, as the movie fiddles with the rule of horror-movie timelines: the prologue sets up a horrific tragedy, which will come back to haunt our heroes ten/fifteen/twenty years later. Simple: prologue in the past, modern day, optional epilogue. MBV gives us a hiccup of sorts: tragedy (miners trapped in a cave-in caused by our hero's negligence), flash-forward to repercussions one year later (a psychotic survivor of the cave-in massacres everyone in his path), followed by another flash-forward to ten years after the massacre. Ha! Take that, slasher-film conventions!
Never mind that the foolishness starts immediately. Harry Warden, our bogeyman, wakes up from a coma in a hospital bed. A hospital bed he's been in for one entire year, in a coma. Remember that, because it's important. He sits up, stretches a bit I suppose (dunno, they didn't show that) and gets right to work, slaughtering his way right out of the hospital ward. I mean, when the cops show up in the next scene, there are bodies everywhere. Blood splattered on walls, torsos ripped open, victims disemboweled, limbs hacked off, even one unfortunate corpse cut in half. It's actually, and I'm talking by the standards of gritty reboots of horror movies here, gratuitously, ludicrously violent. Stallone didn't kill 'em like this in Cobra, for chrissakes. These are scenes Slayer wouldn't use on an album cover. It's fuckin' crazy.
Remember that this man just awoke from a one-year coma.
He then hotfoots it to the mine, you know, the one he was trapped in for six horrific days the year before. (Though as he's supposedly been in a fucking coma the whole time, to him, it may seem like yesterday). Psychotic or no, I'd not want to be anywhere near the damned place ever again if I were him. Just saying. Once there, he promptly (and I do mean promptly) kills off most of those present—a group of young adults having a party. In a mine.
Here's where the silly 3-D moneyshots start, incidentally. (Watching a 3-D movie on television, without the 3-D, makes for a semi-decent drinking game, wherein you take a shot every time a 3-D moneyshot appears on-screen). Anyway, he kills like a ton of people (without making a sound in the process, I might add) but a few escape, including our hero Tom, the negligent, cave-in causing son of the mine's owner. Harry is apparently shot dead by the sheriff.
OR IS HE??!?
And here's where everything falls apart, when we flash-forward ten years after Warden's rampage. Tom comes back to Sleepysville or whatever the hell the town is called, having been gone the entire ten years. His father, the owner of the mine, has died, and now Tom has inherited it. He's just come back to "sign the papers" in order to sell the mine, you see, as I guess they don't have fax machines (or lawyers) in Canada or wherever the hell this place is supposed to be. More people are killed by a jumpsuit-and-gas-mask-wearing, pickaxe wielding maniac, but in between there's lots and lots of tedious talking, and it's not the expository kind either, for the most part. It's just dull, really, though eventually it becomes clear that all the talking is an attempt to drive a mystery: is Harry back, along with Tom?
Or is Tom the killer? Or the unstable, philandering sheriff? Or the psychotic old man in the bar who kicks Tom's ass? While not technically a dangler, MBV does play a little heavy on the see-saw it's-him-no-it's-him thing kinda heavy in its last chapters, but by the time the killer is revealed, you're long, long past caring. This is one of those films that warps space and time, dragging its running length out to several centuries. Entire civilizations will come and go while one pointless murder after another punctuates the glacial equilibrium of long boring talky parts.
Let me elaborate momentarily on the nature of the kills. Virtually all slashers suffer from having an incompetent god for a villain, but not to the extent that MBV does. One the one hand, this guy is capable of slaughtering with impunity—for instance dragging a victim out of the window of a downtown business, chopping them into little bits, and graffiti-ing the wall with their blood, all in about thirty seconds and without being seen. Oh yeah, and he's wearing a jumpsuit, a gas mask, and a helmet with a miner's lamp, not to mention that he's splattered with blood and carrying a pickaxe. Not conspicuous in the least, yeah. He can also break into any house without setting off any alarm, kill an adult and stuff their entire adult-sized body into a clothes dryer in ten seconds flat (again, without making so much as a peep in the process) and even kill several people in and around a motel room and not attract a whiff of attention. This guy's good.
Except when he's not. Except when he sloooowly opens the door to the room his next target is in, giving ample time to react. Except when he swings his axe so clumsily that an injured old man lying prone on the floor can dodge it. Except when he... eh, you get the picture.
And if all that weren't bad enough—the tedium, the contrived 'tension', the whodunnit/whocaresit—those who sit all the way through are treated to one of the dumbest, most awkward sequel setups ever. It's an astonishingly lame ending, all the more so when they easily could have gone in another direction. So it goes.