The 1980 slasher flick Terror Train wasn't half bad actually. It's blessed with a solid story, and decent young actors. Old Hollywood legend Ben Johnson (many of you horror afficianados will know him as the Texas Ranger from The Town That Dreaded Sundown) helps ground performances that may have otherwise gotten out of control. This was one of Jamie Lee Curtis' Scream Queen flicks before she jumped that ship, and believe it or not it presents a very young David Copperfield as "The Illusionist".
Oh yeah, and the biggest asshole in the cast is played by Hart Bochner, who many would know from the Christmas Classic Die Hard as the co-worker of Holly Gennaro who gets himself killed by claiming to be a friend of John McClane's. With coke on his mustache, and Coke in his glass, he gets that smug grin blown off of his face by Hans Gruber. Bochner has a gift for playing dickheads.
Terror Train starts simply enough with a bunch of Freshman sorority members partying down and pulling a pretty dark prank on a helpless geek who ends up in a mental hospital as a result. Jamie Lee Curtis is reluctantly involved in the cold hearted gag initiated by Bochner's soulless character.
We jump three years forward and these same Med Students are going to celebrate New Year's Eve partying it up on a luxury train complete with a band, costumes, and David Copperfield's magic gymnastics. The only problem is someone is murdering people on the train. Is it our helpless gag victim from the beginning, or someone else?
The film is actually well written, with solid dialogue and acting from the students to the veteran Johnson as the train's conductor. All these characters are pretty well set up from the get-go, and you get to know most of them fairly well, which makes you care just a little bit more than you would in your average slasher film when they meet their unfortunate fates.
Technically the film has a lot going for it. It truly was shot on a train and not a set (according to Eli Roth's History of Horror) causing tricky lighting requirements provided by cinema legend John Alcott, whose career only includes A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon, The Shining, No Way Out, and Vice Squad, among others. Director Roger Spottiswoode, who would go on to a long and successful career keeps things tight and moving, and gets decent work from his actors and crew. This couldn't have been an easy shoot.
Kudos to all involved, and if it's New Year's horror you're looking for, Terror Train is a pretty good ride.
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