287. Night Train to Terror

287. Night Train to Terror (1985)
Directors: John Carr, Phillip Marshak, Tom McGowan, Jay Schlossberg-Cohen, and Gregg G. Tallas
Writer: Phillip Yordan
From: Drive-In

A horror anthology where God and Satan haggle over the souls whose various stories make up the anthology.

Anthology films are generally hard to do because you’re trying to grab the audience’s attention, hold it, and bring a narrative to a satisfying conclusion. Then you have to do that at least twice more. However, horror kind of lends itself to the anthology format. I think I’ve said it elsewhere on the blog, but horror is much more about tone than character or plot. With a short piece, you can excel at relating a tone and idea and then getting out before anyone starts to ask questions.

None of which applies to this movie which is just silly when it’s not boring.

Night Train to Terror is an anthology, but it’s not comprised of shorts. Instead, it’s comprised of edited and shortened versions of three other films. Rather than have a short film that has its own beginning, middle, and end, you get three summaries of films, often with extended voice-overs to explain what’s going on.

The frame narrative is God and Satan riding a train and examining cases of individual souls. The “cases” are the three movies that make up this movie. Meanwhile, the train is going to crash at dawn, killing the rock band performing in the next car. They just sing one song, over and over, and, by the end, you’re begging for that crash.

The first story is about a guy who’s kidnapped by evil scientists. They inject him with some mind-control drug and send him out to roofie and kidnap women. This is not only to give the movie lots of context-free nudity, it’s also so the scientists can torture, murder, and then sell the women’s bodies to medical schools. One doctor turns on the other, the guy slips from their control, and all the bad guys get killed. There’s no sense of character or even any sense of what’s going on, so the whole sequence is pretty dull.

The second story is about a man who falls in love with a porno actress. He hunts her down, they get together, but her boss doesn’t want to give her up. So he invites them into the “Death Club” where members subject themselves to Rube Goldberg-ian forms of Russian Roulette: releasing a lethal bug to sting someone in the room, strapping themselves into electric chairs while a computer decides which one get the shock, and laying in sleeping bags under a swinging wrecking ball whose cord is being cut.

This story has more voice-over than the other two because so much of the original movie is glossed. The man bows out of the club after the insect incident, but the boss has him kidnapped at gun point twice to endure the other two. Which don’t kill the guy. Or the boss. So what was the point?

The final story is a movie I already reviewed on the Misery Mill, The Nightmare Never Ends. While this condensed version adds stop-motion monsters that are not in the original, it strips what little sense there was from the original. You still have this demon/Satan surrogate living his immortal life on Earth. A Holocaust survivor tries to kill him and dies instead. This leads Detective Cameron Mitchell (may his name be praised) to investigate and figure out who the demon is. Meanwhile Richard Moll has written a book arguing that God is Dead and his wife is told she must do the work of ridding the world of Satan. Everyone dies except the wife who tries to kill the demon, but butchers someone else instead.

I said at the end of that review that, “With the right perspective and group of friends, this could all be entertainingly bad,” and I’d double-down on that for this movie. The whole approach and sense of gravitas throughout is pretty silly and the stop-motion monsters look deliciously bad. This version, altogether, is much funnier than The Nightmare Never Ends, although it’s still a bad movie. With some chips and beer, though, it’d be great for some Halloween fun.