Terror Train (1980)

I love trains and I love movies set aboard trains. A train is a straight line. You can only go in two directions. Escaping a villain aboard a train will require violence and/or cleverness. There's no escaping from the train save death. Yet it's spacious, stable, and elegant. A train movie should move like a train, along tracks to an inexorable destiny; choices are clear and have direct consequences. Slasher movies, with their predictable final-girl approach, are almost perfectly suited to trains; why there's only one train-slasher hybrid, I don't know. But Terror Train is it and I think it's awesome.

A New Years Party for pre-med students set aboard a train is disrupted by a series of murders linked to a cruel prank three years earlier. Jamie Lee Curtis is the strong girl with a conscience who sees her friends dying around her. Meanwhile (Oscar winner) Ben Johnson, as the conductor, tries to protect his passengers and maintain equilibrium.

I'm not sure why screenwriter T.Y. Drake didn't write more, because Terror Train is very solid at the screenplay level. Each character seems to have a reality and psychology of their own, even if caught only in glimpses. The characters we get to know well are well-rounded, seem to have motives and interests that we never know about but are certainly not just there to service the plot. Why does the character of Doc keep playing cruel pranks on Mo? We never know; it's just the way he is. He clearly really cares about him and is even more devestated than Mo's girlfriend when he dies. Maybe he's in love with him? Maybe envies him? And Carne, the conductor. How little we know about him, yet we feel this simple fellow with his laidback attitude has accumulated a lot of wisdom traversing the dark tracks of the years and his colloquial utterances disguise a sharp mind. I love a moment where he comments on how beautiful it is to see the light of a town. There's something very natural about it.

I've always found slashers pretty effective at delivering scares and Terror Train is no exception. Some moments had me tensed up. My favourite involves a close-up of Ben Johnson's face peering into a cabinet. We know something's in there and by only showing his face, rather than the inside of the cabinet he's looking into, we feel his vulnerability. A fair amount of blood and severed body parts are tossed about, incidentally.

David Copperfield is in this movie as a magician. Not exactly a stretch, there. He does a pretty good job and has a creepy enough stare to make you suspicious of him. There's a pay-off to having him in a slasher movie, too. Whether he is indeed the villain or not, he's not the final girl. Hint hint.

So that's terror train. An above-average slasher that both tastes good and is good for you. Also, the stretch of track traveled in Terror Train? I travel it every Christmas (yep, about the same time the film is set) to visit my family in Quebec. I recognized some spots. How cool is that?

7.5/10