We're going to be doing two train movies over the next two weeks, and if you've been keeping up on things here on the A-List, you can guess what the second one is going to be. For now, we'll be covering Horror Express, a legendarily bizarre Spanish-British sci-fi movie starring Hammer greats Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing. Forever full of unexpected twists, Horror Express brings more than just star power to the table, and while it somehow manages to be boring at times, it's definitely not something horror fans will want to pass on.
In 1906, Dr. Saxton (Lee) is transporting some very precious cargo back to England from Tibet--the frozen mummy of a 2 million year old proto-human creature which may have ties to the yeti. He is irritated by the presence of an old colleague of his, Dr. Wells (Cushing), who is overly curious about the nature of his finding. Before boarding the Transiberian Express, he is additionally irritated by a priest, who tells him his cargo is of the Devil--a statement somewhat easy to believe, given the dead man with the turned-white pupils found mysteriously at the perimeter of the crate; similarly, the priest is unable to draw a cross on the crate with chalk. Saxton, being Christopher Lee, dismisses all of this as rubbish and poppycock and soon he, Wells, and the yeti are aboard the train. Wells eventually pays a porter (VICTOR ISRAEL!!!) to peer inside the crate, but little does he knows that doing so will awaken the yeti's demonic presence. It slowly transpires that the "yeti" was merely the host body for something ancient...and alien. Indeed, by gazing into the retinal images of the dead yeti (in invocation of optography, my favorite pseudoscience) they determine that whatever was wearing the yeti was an extraterrestrial presence left behind on Earth 2 million years prior. All that time, this creature has been waiting for a chance to escape--and it doesn't care who it has to possess or slaughter to leave Earth.
Though there are suggestions of the supernatural--or rather, the super-scientific, for one can assume the alien's powers of possession are merely an evolutionary quirk of its race rather than an employment of magic--from the get-go, I seriously went into this just expecting a yeti-on-a-train movie. That in itself would be pretty fascinating, especially with Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, Victor Israel, and (though I did not mention him in the synopsis) Telly Savalas in tow. Savalas plays a ruthless Russian cossack who boards the train to investigate the deaths, and mostly ends up manhandling the passengers until he learns too late about the alien. Without the alien, however, this movie probably wouldn't end up in A-List territory. For without the alien, we would not have the climax where Christopher Lee fights off an army of zombies, a feat which he probably never replicated.
I really cannot understate how much subverted expectations help this movie. Even in small ways. I bet you'd never see a movie made in Franco's Spain starring the leads of the infamously-conservative Hammer Horror franchises suggest that there are powers which God Himself can't save us from. The question of faith is a big one in this movie and it is never entirely answered--merely explored. I feel it sort of works better that way, raising chicken-or-egg questions on the nature of mythology. Does the alien resemble a demon because it actually comes from Hell, or is it that ancient humans were inspired to create tales of demonic beings because of encounters with the creature? I've always enjoyed stories like this, and that it tells such a story with a light touch is definitely a high point.
The alien also invokes another expected trope when it tries to convince its human enemies that if they let it live, it will use its superior knowledge to get rid of hunger and disease. It's a trick, of course, and we don't even know if that's something the alien can do. But even if it can't, it's a testament to the alien's psychology that it employs this trick. It has learned to be a demon--and demons tempt people. That's how they get you.
Again, the movie does manage to drag in places, but originality is a mighty queen. Horror Express constantly innovates and deconstructs its own ideas while never coming across as silly or ass-pull-y for such. Alien invasion movies set in the early 1900s are rare anyway, so it's totally worth it to check out this one.
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