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.