Terror Train

Terror Train (1980)

Dir. Roger Spottiswoode

Written by T.Y. Drake

Starring Jamie Lee Curtis, Ben Johnson, Hart Bochner, David Copperfield.

TERROR TRAIN is the very embodiment of the slasher movie, a real Slasher’s slasher, the kind of slasher that reminds you what being a slasher is all about. It’s got everything. I mean, it’s got a mysterious masked killer with a grudge rooted in psycho-sexual trauma, it’s got a bunch of airheaded horny college kids partying in an isolated location, it’s got hateable assholes for you to enjoy being murdered, it’s got boobs, it’s got gimmicky kills, it’s got stalking, it’s got a twist reveal, it’s got Jamie Lee Curtis, it’s got extensive sequences of famous stage magician David Copperfield (possibly playing himself) performing on-stage illusions.

OK, so that last one is a little unusual, but of course that’s par for the course with a slasher. Slashers, perhaps more than any other subgenre outside of James Bond films, are, and must be, rigidly formulaic in a few key ways, and once they meet those iron laws of the subgenre, the real fun is in seeing how these particular details play out, and what kind of unusual and colorful details the filmmakers use to color in-between the lines. Just last week, in reviewing THE RUINS, I was grousing about how fastidiously some people insist on distinct genre lines which don’t really exist, fretting about whether THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE is really a slasher because so little of it involves stalking or chasing (it is) or if PEEPING TOM is a slasher despite taking place from the point of view of the killer (it isn’t). To me, you might as well be arguing if James McAvoy is hot or not (he’s not) -- the answer has nothing to do with reality, but with the way you personally decide to define the topic. The facts are clear, it’s just our personal definitions which are arbitrarily constructed, and consequently there’s nothing really to argue.

But TERROR TRAIN is a pretty potent reminder that while fretting about the boundaries of any genre is an exercise in futility, there is definitely a reason we use these categories to discuss film. Things may get fuzzy around the margins, but there definitely are some distinct elements which collectively add up to a recognizable whole we can meaningfully identify as a slasher movie. Like Potter Stewart, I’m extremely hesitant to create a prescriptive definition for this phenomenon, but I’m confident I know it when I see it. And boy oh boy, I know I’m seeing it here. Last year I called BLACK BELLY OF THE TARANTULA the “archetypal giallo,” and I’d be willing to make a similar bold pronouncment about this, its American cousin a little under a decade later. TERROR TRAIN is an unambiguous slasher, effortlessly --and even joyfully-- reveling in its essential genre traditions.

Which is honestly a little surprising, because 1980 is startlingly early for something so perfectly formed. The slasher genre had been coalescing for some time, of course -- depending on how you want to define it, you might trace it back as early as the “madman on the loose” silent films like THE BAT (1926) or THE CAT AND THE CANARY (1927), and then you’ve got Agatha Christie’s 1939 Ten Little Indians novel (adapted for film in 1945), HOUSE OF WAX (1954), PEEPING TOM (1960), the German Krimi films based on the works of Edgar Wallace, the Italian giallo films, particularly Mario Bava’s BLOOD AND BLACK LACE (1964) and BAY OF BLOOD (1971), Bob Clark’s BLACK CHRISTMAS (1974), and of course, John Carpenter’s HALLOWEEN (1978), which I would call the nearly indisputable start of the American slasher wave. I mean, sure, BLACK CHRISTMAS is almost as quintessentially an American slasher film as TERROR TRAIN is, but it was HALLOWEEN’s instantly iconic status (and monstrous box office success) that transformed the slasher from a practical horror framework into an entire subgenre, with its own distinct rules and unmistakable quirks.

Consequently, it’s sort of amazing that TERROR TRAIN, just two years later, arrives as fully formed as it does. Look at fellow 1980 HALLOWEEN ripoff HE KNOWS YOU’RE ALONE, and it’s clear that while Hollywood instinctively knew that Carpenter’s take on the subject was definitive, it was anything but obvious what elements of that movie were essential to imitate, and what elements they should feel free to improvise on. As I pointed out when I reviewed HE KNOWS YOU’RE ALONE, these early slashers “had only one template to follow, resulting in [HE KNOWS YOU'RE ALONE being] in a lot of ways identical to HALLOWEEN, often replicating specific shots… or even the score --which is at times so close it delves into outright plagiarism-- but also weirdly different in tone from the deluge of other slasher rip-offs which would follow.“ Not everyone had figured out exactly what to mimic in order to capture HALLOWEEN’s distinctive magic, and were just throwing different elements at the wall to see what stuck. Even the FRIDAY THE 13th series --so intrinsically linked to the slasher genre that I think it frequently serves as shorthand for it-- took two sequels to tweak the formula to the zen perfection it would become. Not TERROR TRAIN director Roger Spottiswoode (TOMORROW NEVER DIES) or writer T.Y. Drake (primarily a folk singer in his only theatrically released screenplay), though -- despite the relative paucity of horror credentials in their respective filmographies, they seemed to instinctively know the natural beats of the slasher genre, and recreate them effortlessly here.

One aspect they decided was important enough to straight-up steal right off the bat was HALLOWEEN star Jamie Lee Curtis (FREAKY FRIDAY 2003), who again plays an archetypal role which would not be given an official name until Carol J. Clover’s genre-defining book Men, Women, and Chainsaws dubbed it with the sobriquet by which it is now almost universally recognized: The Final Girl. And just like in HALLOWEEN, there’s a hint of mythic moralizing here, in that her peers --drunk, high, promiscuous, debased, selfish-- are sentenced to death, while she --if not specifically virginal, then at least less outright Caligulan than her peers-- is destined to survive and prevail. What’s different here is that, somewhat in the tradition of the giallo but crucial to the slasher genre, TERROR TRAIN adds an element of specific moral punishment. These teens are not being butchered simply for being lascivious and improper, they’re being punished because of a particular wrong which was done to the killer many years ago. With FRIDAY THE 13th also arriving the same year (and similarly proposing a killer getting revenge for a long-ago crime), this element of retribution for a real or perceived injury would soon be firmly established as possibly the one essential element of the Slasher genre not present in HALLOWEEN, where Michael Myers is presented as a purely unmotivated malevolent force, a “bad seed” evil from his very childhood.

The offense which has so aggrieved our killer in this case is glimpsed in the prologue, where a group of incoming college students play a cruel (and grotesque, not to mention illegal) trick on a nerdy new guy, and push an uncomfortable and reluctant Alana (Curtis*) into the role of bait. Well, in a surprise turn of events that no one could possibly have predicted, the fragile young virgin who is to become the victim of the "prank" does not take very well to being tricked into kissing a dismembered corpse stolen from the morgue (what the fuck!?), and so when the movie cuts forward in time four years to a massive end-of-college masked party held on a train, we’re all pretty sure who’s going to show up and spoil the fun, especially for the prank’s stupendously dickish architect Doc Manley** (Hart Bochner -- that’s right, Ellis himself! I’m sure he’s a nice guy in real life, but man does he play a great asshole). Of course, no one has seen the guy since they sent him to the nuthouse four years ago, so no one is quite sure who the mystery killer is, though the smart money's on the unnamed suspicious train magician (David Copperfield, real-life illusionist extraordinaire) who no one can seem to recall hiring, and who takes special delight in antagonizing Doc (but then again, who wouldn’t?)

What follows, of course, is a stately and finely-tuned march towards various exotic deaths for the masked revelers, as a fiend (who starts out in a Groucho Marx mask, to my eternal delight) isolates and butchers them one by one, while kindly train conductor Mr. Carne (Ben Muthafuckin’ Johnson, THE WILD BUNCH, THE LAST PICTURE SHOW, but also THE TOWN THAT DREADED SUNDOWN and THE SWARM -- see my review of TOWN THAT DREADED SUNDOWN for my definitive giddy tribute to this ineffable icon of real life cool) gradually realizes that something is amiss and attempts to save his rowdy passengers.

The addition of the the benevolent conductor character is the film’s one step outside the classic slasher format, which is generally unlikely to put forward an authority figure as a chief protagonist. And as much as I love Johnson, and as wonderful as he is here playing the warm, kindly old conductor thrown into a nightmarish scenario no one could prepare for, it’s a misstep; the narrative must and eventually does revolve around Curtis’ Final Girl, and having a well-meaning and reasonably effective figure of authority as the most active character until the final reel dilutes the minimalist elegance of the inevitable battle of wills between killer and determined survivor. It’s also unmistakably a misjudged lift from HALLOWEEN -- Mr. Carne is TERROR TRAIN’s answer to HALLOWEEN’s Dr. Loomis, of course-- a rare give that TERROR TRAIN is carefully mimicking a very particular movie, and not yet savvy enough to mimic an established genre structure. Loomis, and the somewhat odd structure of HALLOWEEN --where Laurie Strode spends much of the movie completely unaware that a killer is in her immediate future-- work splendidly for that particular film, but will not ultimately becomes staples of the genre. You can’t fault them for not understanding that fact yet, of course, but it’s a crucial detail which helps explain this particular film’s place in horror history.

Nevertheless, that’s more of an observation than a complaint; Johnson is a delight to see on the screen, and the movie cooks along splendidly, with one well-paced wrinkle after another. Unlike many lower-effort slasher filmmakers who would follow, Spottiswoode and Drake avoid the urge to turn the plot into loosely-connected episodic murder set pieces, doling those out as necessary but also foregrounding the cheeky mystery plot and dwelling on well-crafted Hitchcockian suspense pieces (when the conductor discovers a masked corpse, he returns to find the killer dressed up in the same costume, but quite alive. Will he discover the ruse in time?) I’m not saying the film is classy, because it’s pure exploitation trash through and through, but it’s also sturdily constructed exploitation trash, shot through with a strong sense of mordant black humor and attention to detail (the final confrontation involves the killer knocking out lightbulbs and lurking just behind the opaque black curtain of shadows to suddenly pounce forward, and the lighting and camerawork which makes this possible are a case study in finely-crafted genre nonsense.)

And what else need I say, dear reader? Either that sounds good to you or you immediately know this isn’t your thing. Diving deeper into the details of the plot, the various red herrings and the particulars of the murders (which are not, quite yet, the gimmicky gorehound set pieces they would eventually become as the genre matured [or degraded, depending on your point of view], but are respectfully brutal and amiably peppered throughout) would be wasted words, and would, besides, spoil the joy of seeing how the old familiar beats play out this time around. If you’re in the mood for a classically structured American slasher film with a comfortable surfeit of colorful personality, you’ve got one here. If not, I think you probably already know that TERROR TRAIN is not for you.

* Huh, I just saw that she’s married to Christopher Guest. And that Guest is actually a titled member of the British House of Lords under the name 5th Baron Hadon-Guest. Wikipedia is a black hole.

** Has there ever been a better porn name which went uncommented on?

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2017 CHECKLIST!

The Discreet Charm of the Killing Spree

TAGLINE	The Boys and Girls of Sigma Phi, Some Will Live, Some Will Die which is great enough by itself, but there's also one that says Don't Waste Money On Return Fare... You Won't Be Coming Back!
TITLE ACCURACY	100%
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	No
SEQUEL?	None, which is kind of a shame, but the idea of the slasher Franchise as simply a standard expectation was still a few years away.
REMAKE?	None
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	USA-Canada
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Slasher
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	Ben Johnson, and, in retrospect, Jamie Lee Curtis
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	Curtis
NUDITY?	Briefly, but it’s in there.
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	Another one where a girl is trying to force herself on a very reluctant guy. And of course, there’s that unfortunate business at the start here.
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	No animals
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	None
POSSESSION?	No
CREEPY DOLLS?	No
EVIL CULT?	No
MADNESS?	The killer is said to have been in an asylum prior to the film’s events, and seems to have some pretty deep-rooted issues, although to be honest considering what was done to him you wouldn’t really have to be insane to seek this kind of revenge.
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	No
VOYEURISM?	We get a little bit of killer POV, but surprisingly not much, considering the iconic mask sequence which opens HALLOWEEN.
MORAL OF THE STORY	Jesus Christ people, how many time do I have to tell you, never trick mentally unstable virgins into getting into bed with a dismembered corpse for a fraternity prank, what is wrong with you people, I swear.