Night Train to Terror (1985), by John Carr, Philip Marsak, Tom McGowan, Jay Schlossberg-Cohen, and Gregg G. Tallas

With this review, I have now reviewed this movie three times over--and we're not done yet. When I was talking about Gretta and The Nightmare Never Ends, I may have alluded to the fact that the third piece of this anthology was never finished or released. Well, I was wrong. When I made that statement I knew that third movie as Scream Your Head Off, with a 1981 production date. A meager amount of research on my part would have unearthed that Scream Your Head Off was released eleven years after it began production, under the rather odd title of Marilyn: Alive and Behind Bars. But that movie is for another day; we're here to talk about Night Train to Terror, the primary reason why any of the three movies it was slashed out from are remembered.

God, Satan, and a mysterious third party who may be Death, are aboard a train. Also aboard is a REALLY shitty '80s pop band, whose lives are on the line: the train is due to crash at midnight, and God and Satan are here to debate the nature of humanity in order to determine whether the band will go to Heaven or Hell when they die. In order to convince God that humanity isn't worth saving, Satan tells God three stories, each of which supposedly prove humanity's evil. In "The Case of Harry Billings" (aka Scream Your Head Off), the titular Harry Billings kills his wife with drunk driving and ends up in a weird mental institution which chains up naked women for the purposes of rape (I think?) and organ harvesting. The main doctor there turns Harry into his drugged/hypnotic agent to abduct women for this purpose. The head nurse is also banging Harry and plans to have him help her lobotomize the head doctor so she can take over the hospital. It's pretty fucking weird.

Next is "The Case of Gretta Connors," aka Gretta. Things are kept pretty much the same, but they try to make Gretta seem more like a victim and George seem more evil; the primary focus is on the Death Wish Club. The main oddity of this segment is that they never explain why Gretta becomes Charlie White--she just suddenly looks like a guy for some reason. While they prominently feature the beetle scene, they also add on new footage of the beetle (rendered with claymation) escaping the room and killing a random makeout couple in a scene that totally doesn't have different video quality. By kill them, I mean it stings them, and this makes their faces explode.

Finally, we have "The Case of Claire Hansen," cleaved from the meat of The Nightmare Never Ends. I saw very few differences here and it actually told the story much more efficiently than the original film did. However, there are some scenes which appear to be of the same type of tacked-on claymation gore as that which appeared in the Gretta segment. I suspect similar sequences were added to the Scream Your Head Off bits, but we'll find out when I finally get around to Marilyn: Alive and Behind Bars.

I cannot imagine what it would be like to watch Night Train to Terror without context, aside from the obvious fact that it would be a headrush of unparalleled vertigo. Even with context, Night Train is a heady brew of Doris Wishman-esque cuts, unexplained plot threads, and hidden surprises. Every segment is discombobulated, with traces of subplots floating here and there and yet meaning nothing. This includes the new footage shot for the film. They try to make the pop band on the train into actual characters, despite the fact that all they do is sing the same songs over and over and over again; there's a mention of, "Oh, man, it's too bad our van broke down and we had to take this train!"--as if we could possibly care. How does that even make sense? Trains have to go to very specific places, and even if one was going to where I was headed I'd still worry about leaving my van behind to jump one! To me, that's like saying, "Shit, my motorcycle is out of gas. Might as well charter a cruise ship home then." It's ditching one line of vehicle for another. But I'm getting off-track: again, we're supposed to believe that there's an actual story to this frame story besides the God-Satan thing, and one line is supposed to cover the whole depth of that story. That's a perfect synecdoche for the entire movie. That line is patchwork and so is the rest of the film.

Perhaps I'll have more of a chance in the future to delve into this genre of patchwork remakes, which has existed since forever. For now, both Night Train to Terror and The White Gorilla are fine additions to my A-List, and I'll be returning to their uniquely Burroughsian madness time and time again. In regards to Night Train specifically, I will be returning to it in a stranger sense, when at last the time comes to review the third movie from its twisted catalogue.

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Horror Express (1972), by Eugenio Martin

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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