Terror Train

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.