Terror Train begins in a manner similar to Prom
Night, also released in 1980 and starring Jamie Lee Curtis, with a prank
gone wrong. This time, a group of obnoxious frat guys play a trick on one
of their pledges, the nerdy Kenny (Derek MacKinnon), making him think he's
going to lose his virginity to the beautiful Alana (Curtis). She tells
Kenny to come kiss her, but when he approaches, he discovers he's in bed with a
cadaver and understandably freaks out. Three years later, the students
are celebrating their graduation with a New Year's costume party aboard a
train. The festivities are interrupted, however, when someone starts
killing the passengers.
The train is a good setting for a slasher, as it really traps the characters,
leaving them with no way out. And because the action takes place during a
costume party, the killer dons various disguises, making it easy for him to
pretend to be someone else and gain his victims' trust. The villain
remains masked for most of the film. I'm not sure whether his identity
was supposed to be a mystery, but it's completely obvious who he is long before
the big reveal. The film isn't very suspenseful, and gore is kept to a
minimum, with most kills taking place off-screen; the big effect is a
decapitated head that looks really fake and is shown for approximately one
second.
With the possible exception of Alana, none of the characters are very
sympathetic. The most annoying is Doc (Hart Bochner), a loud, arrogant
asshole who cares about no one but himself. And his friend Mo; there are
some serious homosexual undertones here. Doc deliberately gets Mo in
trouble with Alana, telling him, "If she dumps you, you've always got me,
you know. I mean it." When Mo
is found dead (the killing having taken place offscreen, of course), Doc takes
it harder than Alana does, shrieking and sobbing uncontrollably as he paws at
Mo's body.
As expected, Curtis does a fine job of screaming her lungs out, and she goes
head-to-head with the villain in a well-done, intense chase scene.
Interestingly, it is not her character, but Ben Johnson's Carne, the conductor,
who first discovers the bodies and tries to convince others of the danger
onboard. David Copperfield is woefully out of place, playing - what
else - a magician, whose tricks seem to take up roughly half the film's
runtime. Pacing is an issue here, with lots of time wasted on magic and
passengers dancing to disco music. The first hour especially is very,
very slow.
Terror Train has a few things going for it, most notably its
setting, but turns out to be a by-the-numbers slasher with very little
slashing.
