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| Horror |
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TERROR TRAIN
Rating: 
Canada. 1980.
Director – Roger Spottiswoode, Screenplay – T.Y. Drake, Producer – Harold Greenberg, Photography – John Alcott, Music – John Mills-Cockle, Special Effects – Josef Elsner, Makeup – Michele Burke & Joan Isaacson, Production Design – Glenn Bydwell. Production Company – Astral.
Cast:
Ben Johnson (Carne), Jamie Lee Curtis (Alana), Hart Bochner (Doc), David Copperfield (Magician), Derek MacKinnon (Kenny Hampton), Sandra Currie (Mitchy), Timothy Webber (Mo), Anthony Sherwood (Jackson), Howard Busgang (Ed), Steve Michaels (Charlie)
Plot: A group of med students play a cruel gag on nerd Kenny Hampton at a New Year’s Party where a girl lures Kenny into bed but leaves him there with a corpse taken from the morgue. The shock sends Kenny insane. Three years later, the same group holds a fancy dress party aboard a train that they have chartered for a cross-country trip to celebrate their graduation. However, Kenny sneaks aboard in disguise and starts killing off those responsible for the prank.
While Terror Train is not much more than a wheelbound Friday the 13th (1980), it is one of the better films to emerge in the short-lived but prolific 1980-3 slasher cycle. Terror Train was directed by Canadian Roger Spottiswoode, who went on to better things, including the acclaimed war zone journalism film Under Fire (1982), followed by the mainstream likes of Air America (1990), Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot (1992), the James Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies (1997) and the Arnold Schwarzenegger sf/action film The 6th Day (2000).
The plot treads through the basic cliches and set-ups of the genre but Roger Spottiswoode makes a slick and effective package of the material. He generates a fair degree of tension and the characters have a little more dimensionality than usual, even if there are far too many of them. Jamie Lee Curtis, who rose to become the quintessential early 80s horror heroine after Halloween (1978), is cast to type in another of her always reliable genre roles. Elsewhere, it is an unusual cast, including also Ben Johnson as an aging conductor, real-life magician David Copperfield as an enigmatic and never fully explained character simply called The Magician, and Hart Bochner as the cruel ringleader of the group.
What makes Terror Train stand out is the photography, which in a surprising touch of class comes from Stanley Kubrick’s regular cinematographer John Alcott – the scenes of the train moving through the haunted snowbound Canadian twilight zone, which hovers on the empty ink-blue edge of night, have an extraordinary beauty.
Copyright Richard Scheib 1999-2012
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