Terror Train
Every Thursday night I set my alarm two hours later, vainly hoping that I'll be able to sleep in on Friday, and every Friday I lose a touch of my sanity when the alarm goes off -- after I've already involuntarily been up even earlier than I usually get up for work because my subconscious is a slave to the corporate machine and even in sleep I cannot escape its hold. And I spend the rest of the day in a piss-poor mood.
I was hoping to sleep in today, yet -- here I am. But I'm glad I'm in a bad mood because Terror Train is a bad movie and I want to be in bad mood writing about it.
The experience of watching Terror Train is akin to those paradoxical torments in life that simply should not be, like having an anticlimactic orgasm. It belongs in the vast purgatory of mediocre movies. It's best shot at being remembered at all is not as a lamentable whole but in confusing one of its parts with a part in a better movie. Such confusion and half-remembering had best be left alone and not pursued to the extremes of rewatching Terror Train.
The early history of slasher movie criticism can be characterized with no exaggeration as one of repeated accusations of plagiarism. Most early slasher movies evade this criticism because critics confuse convention with stealing and most slasher movies are different in their own ways to be enjoyable. Terror Train, however, is the first of the early slasher movies that sucks because of its formulaic plot, which makes it boring -- the cardinal sin of all movies but especially horror movies.
The movie is about a man who, after suffering a prank at the hands of his frat brothers and sorority sisters, returns three years later to kill them on a costume party held, quite bizarrely, on a train. Why a train -- I have no idea. The logistics of filming, hell -- even the cost of train stock footage -- does not seem worth such a premise. The kills, without exception, are offscreen. Even the resulting corpses are uninteresting and even further depress your engagement by showing that, however they died, their murders must have been as unspectacular as to waste even more time.
But first -- our main characters. The bullies include Mo, the sensitive but still shitty boyfriend of Jamie Less Curtis; Curtis herself, playing her usual slasher role; Doc, the asshole frat boy who likes morbid pranks; and D Jack, Mitchy, and Ed. That's a deliberate diminuendo because these characters are not interesting enough to rank in any list of importance. Ed, in particular, is insufferable with his Groucho Marx costume and heinous puns, and even though he is killed early on, he is still so annoying as to immediately piss you off and ruin the movie right out the gate.
There are many other frat boys and sorority sisters, mostly extras. The extras, during the movie's opening bonfire scene, give a more energetic performance than Terror Train deserves and -- good for them. If performance is to be our criterion for a career in movies, these extras in their ephemeral episodes stood as good as if not a better chance at fame than any of the main actors.
Terror Train is what you get when you replace the frat boy cast of Animal House with actual frat boys aspiring to be them.
But even though Terror Train sucks, it doesn't tease and flirt with half-sucking but deep-throat sucks right away. Even before the killer starts killing, there's drama between Curtis and Mo and Doc. Curtis does not like Doc because of his pranks and above all his prank on Kenny -- the killer -- and is put out that she got tricked into going to Doc's party. Mo had told her it was his party, but in fact it was Doc's and Mo simply paid for it. This begs the questions of how many parties Doc has thrown independently and why Curtis has a problem with them as opposed to the collectively thrown fraternity parties where she'll have to see and interact and put up with Doc as much as if the idea for the party sprang from her own self. Curtis is also irked with Mo, who lied about the party being his idea, whereas the true father of the party was Doc and Mo merely its sugar daddy.
Remember the pitfalls of relationship drama in horror movies I mentioned?
Yeah. More than just conventional baggage was brought on this torturous train.
Oh yeah. David Copperfield is in it and he does magic.
This drama is aggravating because there are no sex scenes in Terror Train, and you can do nothing but submit to the fights and pouts, knowing all along that somewhere on this train some people are having sex, or a conversation, or even just sitting there with blank, drunken or drugged faces between shot and reverse shot looking skimpy and sexy, and any of that in any degree is better than this intolerable drama.
The drama, however, is not relieved with the murders. The one convention Terror Train elaborates from Halloween is that the killer puts on the costume of his latest victim. His main targets are the bullies, and thus there was the opportunity of interlacing the murders with the drama, but the two stay apart always, the drama only getting worse despite the lessened number of assholes participating in it.
The murders drag on and on in the movie's misplaced confidence in its tension, cutting now and then to the party that, also dragging on and on with bad music and even fucking slow dancing, slowly reveals that there is nothing on this train of murder and sex we never see, pot and a cocaine we can't imbibe, and the middle-aged goings on of the conductor and his crew that is worth watching.
Eventually the killer is discovered, a discovery that literally brings the plot to a screeching halt. From there on it tries to build more tension, with only Curtis and Doc left to kill and an intoxicated mass of college idiots we must watch the conductor babysit. This brings me to the inescapable flaw of the killer's plan.
By putting on the costume of his victim, this buys him enough time to kill another, a pattern that could hold long enough to kill all the bullies, if not most of the train. Sure, the bullies will begin to miss their friends, but they are so caught up in their drama and repulsive while in it that no one outside their little group would surely miss them. And if the bullies miss bitching at one another enough to go looking for each other, so much the better.
But his game is up as soon as a dead body is found, and once that happens -- despite his pathetic attempts to disguise one crime scene as a prank -- the train is stopped and the movie thereafter is as boring as a horror movie can be. So boring that at some point -- rather during the several searches for him all through the train, or Curtis's many spaz fits -- at some point it will dawn on you with unforgiving fury that Kenny should have just thrown the dead bodies off the goddamned train.
The movie gets only worse. There is a long and pointless chase sequence, not one but two fake deaths of the killer, and a final death in which a dummy drops from the train and floats down an icy river -- a death as un-entertaining and devoid of catharsis as if designed to be so.
So what, you might have been asking, was the big bad prank that drove Kenny to this master plan of revenge? And oh, is it a plan indeed. He gets involved in the magic community long enough to become David Copperfeild's assistant, a role that requires him to dress in drag to avoid suspicion, which involves a long double life like something out of the Prestige, only to get a gig -- seemingly randomly -- at this party three years hence from the prank, just to kill his bullies that he could have killed in any disguise at any frat party before.
That prank was Doc et. al. persuading him to sleep with Curtis, whom they wickedly switched in bed with a dead woman. And it took such a great deal of persuasion to convince him to sleep with Curtis, even to the extent of Mitchy conducting him to the bed like a madame at a brothel, that Kenny can not but be an utter moron for not suspecting it all as a scheme. The prank is dark and gross, sure -- but is it so bad as to go to that effort and time to murder four or five people rather than just get on with life? It doesn't make Kenny sympathetic, and isn't so traumatic that it would drive him insane, a flaw the movie actually relaizes by giving Curtis a throwaway line about Kenny having killed someone before.
Anway, a great opportunity was missed. Rather than winding himself up in drapes and screaming, then going to the "hospital", Kenny had an alternative. When the frat boys rushed in to laugh at him, he should just said "Joke's on you, fuckers. I'm into this shit. Dead post-autopsy women are just my game."
But Kenny must have his revenge, and his revenge is greater on us than his bullies, we who have to watch it. But at least, and this might be Terror Train's only merit, it is forgettable.
Every Thursday night I set my alarm two hours later, vainly hoping that I'll be able to sleep in on Friday, and every Friday I lose a touch of my sanity when the alarm goes off -- after I've already involuntarily been up even earlier than I usually get up for work because my subconscious is a slave to the corporate machine and even in sleep I cannot escape its hold. And I spend the rest of the day in a piss-poor mood.
I was hoping to sleep in today, yet -- here I am. But I'm glad I'm in a bad mood because Terror Train is a bad movie and I want to be in bad mood writing about it.
The experience of watching Terror Train is akin to those paradoxical torments in life that simply should not be, like having an anticlimactic orgasm. It belongs in the vast purgatory of mediocre movies. It's best shot at being remembered at all is not as a lamentable whole but in confusing one of its parts with a part in a better movie. Such confusion and half-remembering had best be left alone and not pursued to the extremes of rewatching Terror Train.
The early history of slasher movie criticism can be characterized with no exaggeration as one of repeated accusations of plagiarism. Most early slasher movies evade this criticism because critics confuse convention with stealing and most slasher movies are different in their own ways to be enjoyable. Terror Train, however, is the first of the early slasher movies that sucks because of its formulaic plot, which makes it boring -- the cardinal sin of all movies but especially horror movies.
The movie is about a man who, after suffering a prank at the hands of his frat brothers and sorority sisters, returns three years later to kill them on a costume party held, quite bizarrely, on a train. Why a train -- I have no idea. The logistics of filming, hell -- even the cost of train stock footage -- does not seem worth such a premise. The kills, without exception, are offscreen. Even the resulting corpses are uninteresting and even further depress your engagement by showing that, however they died, their murders must have been as unspectacular as to waste even more time.
But first -- our main characters. The bullies include Mo, the sensitive but still shitty boyfriend of Jamie Less Curtis; Curtis herself, playing her usual slasher role; Doc, the asshole frat boy who likes morbid pranks; and D Jack, Mitchy, and Ed. That's a deliberate diminuendo because these characters are not interesting enough to rank in any list of importance. Ed, in particular, is insufferable with his Groucho Marx costume and heinous puns, and even though he is killed early on, he is still so annoying as to immediately piss you off and ruin the movie right out the gate.
There are many other frat boys and sorority sisters, mostly extras. The extras, during the movie's opening bonfire scene, give a more energetic performance than Terror Train deserves and -- good for them. If performance is to be our criterion for a career in movies, these extras in their ephemeral episodes stood as good as if not a better chance at fame than any of the main actors.
Terror Train is what you get when you replace the frat boy cast of Animal House with actual frat boys aspiring to be them.
But even though Terror Train sucks, it doesn't tease and flirt with half-sucking but deep-throat sucks right away. Even before the killer starts killing, there's drama between Curtis and Mo and Doc. Curtis does not like Doc because of his pranks and above all his prank on Kenny -- the killer -- and is put out that she got tricked into going to Doc's party. Mo had told her it was his party, but in fact it was Doc's and Mo simply paid for it. This begs the questions of how many parties Doc has thrown independently and why Curtis has a problem with them as opposed to the collectively thrown fraternity parties where she'll have to see and interact and put up with Doc as much as if the idea for the party sprang from her own self. Curtis is also irked with Mo, who lied about the party being his idea, whereas the true father of the party was Doc and Mo merely its sugar daddy.
Remember the pitfalls of relationship drama in horror movies I mentioned?
Yeah. More than just conventional baggage was brought on this torturous train.
Oh yeah. David Copperfield is in it and he does magic.
This drama is aggravating because there are no sex scenes in Terror Train, and you can do nothing but submit to the fights and pouts, knowing all along that somewhere on this train some people are having sex, or a conversation, or even just sitting there with blank, drunken or drugged faces between shot and reverse shot looking skimpy and sexy, and any of that in any degree is better than this intolerable drama.
The drama, however, is not relieved with the murders. The one convention Terror Train elaborates from Halloween is that the killer puts on the costume of his latest victim. His main targets are the bullies, and thus there was the opportunity of interlacing the murders with the drama, but the two stay apart always, the drama only getting worse despite the lessened number of assholes participating in it.
The murders drag on and on in the movie's misplaced confidence in its tension, cutting now and then to the party that, also dragging on and on with bad music and even fucking slow dancing, slowly reveals that there is nothing on this train of murder and sex we never see, pot and a cocaine we can't imbibe, and the middle-aged goings on of the conductor and his crew that is worth watching.
Eventually the killer is discovered, a discovery that literally brings the plot to a screeching halt. From there on it tries to build more tension, with only Curtis and Doc left to kill and an intoxicated mass of college idiots we must watch the conductor babysit. This brings me to the inescapable flaw of the killer's plan.
By putting on the costume of his victim, this buys him enough time to kill another, a pattern that could hold long enough to kill all the bullies, if not most of the train. Sure, the bullies will begin to miss their friends, but they are so caught up in their drama and repulsive while in it that no one outside their little group would surely miss them. And if the bullies miss bitching at one another enough to go looking for each other, so much the better.
But his game is up as soon as a dead body is found, and once that happens -- despite his pathetic attempts to disguise one crime scene as a prank -- the train is stopped and the movie thereafter is as boring as a horror movie can be. So boring that at some point -- rather during the several searches for him all through the train, or Curtis's many spaz fits -- at some point it will dawn on you with unforgiving fury that Kenny should have just thrown the dead bodies off the goddamned train.
The movie gets only worse. There is a long and pointless chase sequence, not one but two fake deaths of the killer, and a final death in which a dummy drops from the train and floats down an icy river -- a death as un-entertaining and devoid of catharsis as if designed to be so.
So what, you might have been asking, was the big bad prank that drove Kenny to this master plan of revenge? And oh, is it a plan indeed. He gets involved in the magic community long enough to become David Copperfeild's assistant, a role that requires him to dress in drag to avoid suspicion, which involves a long double life like something out of the Prestige, only to get a gig -- seemingly randomly -- at this party three years hence from the prank, just to kill his bullies that he could have killed in any disguise at any frat party before.
That prank was Doc et. al. persuading him to sleep with Curtis, whom they wickedly switched in bed with a dead woman. And it took such a great deal of persuasion to convince him to sleep with Curtis, even to the extent of Mitchy conducting him to the bed like a madame at a brothel, that Kenny can not but be an utter moron for not suspecting it all as a scheme. The prank is dark and gross, sure -- but is it so bad as to go to that effort and time to murder four or five people rather than just get on with life? It doesn't make Kenny sympathetic, and isn't so traumatic that it would drive him insane, a flaw the movie actually relaizes by giving Curtis a throwaway line about Kenny having killed someone before.
Anway, a great opportunity was missed. Rather than winding himself up in drapes and screaming, then going to the "hospital", Kenny had an alternative. When the frat boys rushed in to laugh at him, he should just said "Joke's on you, fuckers. I'm into this shit. Dead post-autopsy women are just my game."
But Kenny must have his revenge, and his revenge is greater on us than his bullies, we who have to watch it. But at least, and this might be Terror Train's only merit, it is forgettable.