‘Well, you know what they say: cold hands, warm heart...’
Slasher movies were notoriously ubiquitous in the ’80s. The huge success of Halloween in ’77 opened the floodgates for all kinds of waifs and strays on the horror landscape. The key to finding the gold coin in the dog turd is to find something that makes that slasher film different to all of the others. Well, Terror Train has scream queen and notorious final girl Jamie Lee Curtis in the starring role which is great start. But it also has a bunch of other weird and wonderful stuff going on. First time director Roger Spottiswoode would go on to direct an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie and a Bond film. Aside from JLC, the cast contains both an Oscar winner (Ben Johnson) and an actual magician (David Copperfield). Hart Bochner, who plays a smug jock character here would go on to play a sleazy businessman in Die Hard. And that’s before we’ve even mentioned the plot…
Terror Train leaves the station with a cold open that is a play on that old urban legend that sees medical students use the body of a cadaver as a prank in order to trick some unsuspecting victim who then subsequently goes insane. On this occasion, it is fraternity leader Doc (Bochner) and his frat boy idiot friends who pull the trick off, with nerdy junior Kenny Hampson (Derek McKinnon) the victim. Three years later, the fraternity and its various hangers on have booked a party train to celebrate their graduation. When guests start dying off, it seems that Kenny has come back to enact a terrible revenge.
So, Halloween on a train. On the surface that is what we are dealing with. Scratch a little deeper; however, and there is a lot more going on here – not always in a good way. The inclusion of an intense performance from Copperfield, his only time playing someone other than himself on screen, is mystifying, as is the performance of McKinnon (who gave a candid interview about his experiences of making Terror Train here.)
Elsewhere, Lee Curtis’ star power radiates throughout, but the odd script and uneven pacing undo a lot of her good work. The train itself is beautifully rendered by cinematographer John Alcott (a role he also fulfilled alongside Stanley Kubrick on such films as 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Shining), and the conceit that the killer changes his mask every 20 minutes or so is an interesting one – even if it is the haunting Groucho Marx mask that would eventually become the one most associated with the film.
Terror Train is a film that has been largely forgotten, probably because it never spawned a franchise, but of all the generic slasher films that followed in the wake of Halloween, this is one that is actually worth watching. An eccentric treat.