Village of the Damned (1995)

(yes, apparently they did this intentionally. I don't know who thought that looked acceptable.)

Village of the Damned (1995)

Dir. John Carpenter

Written by David Himmelstein, based on the screenplay by Stirling Silliphant, Wolf Rilla, and Ronald Kinnoch, based on the novel by John Wyndham

Starring Christopher Reeve, Thomas Dekker, Lindsey Haun, Kirstie Alley, Linda Kozlowski, Michael Paré, and Meredith Salenger, but who gives a shit about any of them, because it also features Mark fucking Hamill as “Reverend George.” That’s right, you got a John Carpenter movie with God Damn Luke Skywalker in it. And you haven’t even seen it, you lazy, worthless ingrate. I bet you’ve seen at least one of those idiot JJ Abrams STAR TREK movies and yet you’ve never even considered watching this mid-career offering from one of the genre’s acknowledged masters, even though it stars fucking Mark Hamill. You’re everything that’s wrong with the world, and it’s time you admitted that.

            Another day, another entry into our ever-growing How Could It Not Be Great? canon. Holy shit, you think, John Carpenter, just a year after the underrated IN THE MOUTH OF MADNESS, adapting a novel by the great mid-century sci-fi author John Wyndham (which had already been adapted into something of a minor classic in 1960), with a decent budget and a solid cast, how could this not be… Oh, who am I kidding? You know exactly how this could not be great. Let’s face it, remaking the 1960 British sci-fi/horror staple VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED in 1995 was a bad idea from the get-go. The original was deeply and inseparably a product of its time, drawing its charm from a fragile mix of Cold War anxiety, mild 60’s British transgressiveness, and stagey (and in retrospect, more than a little campy) but earnest black-and-white dreamy matinee creeps.

I am a writer by avocation, but as a writer about film, I concede to the medium the broad axiom that “a picture is worth a thousand words.” So consider these three shots to be the 3,000 or so words it would take me to properly articulate what the 1960 VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED is all about:

I mean, those three shots tell you everything you need to know about it, good and bad. On one hand, there’s no getting around the fact that the little blond kids with glowing eyes and slack faces are corny as hell. They’re meant to look alien and uncanny, of course, but the effect is just so artificial and oversold that it’s hard to take it seriously. On the other hand, the black and white film combined with the pervading stagey and artificial quality of 50’s British genre cinema (which this resembles much more than the Hammer-influenced gothic horror explosion of the 60s) also allows the film to neatly sidestep realism and offer the viewer at least the option of meeting the film’s signature iconography on its own terms. Most genre fiction, after all, requires a certain suspension of disbelief, and in their own native milieu, I think even the glowing-eye towheads of VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED are a functional object, of sorts.

But let me ask you this, what if we did the same thing in 1995 in glorious COLOR? 

                        So yeah, this was never going to be a good idea, and, it should be noted, even Carpenter himself wasn’t too enthused about the project. As he succinctly put it in a 2011 interview, “I’m really not passionate about Village of the Damned. I was getting rid of a contractual assignment.” Which is fair enough, I guess. I mean, a job’s a job, and those Lakers tickets don’t pay for themselves.

            The end result of that contractual assignment is a film which is hardly in danger of being mistaken for a passion project. It’s entirely competent -- nothing here suggests the bizarrely misjudged boondoggle of GHOSTS OF MARS, only six years and two films away -- but it categorically resists rising to any kind of high point that would give us a clue as to what someone thought the point was supposed to be. In fact, the plot hews so closely to the original film that the script by David Himmelstein (a baffling, sparse resume of four writing credits between 1986-1996, ranging from the Edward James Olmos sports flick TALENT FOR THE GAMES to Sidney Lumet’s POWER) is credited as an adaptation of the 1960 screenplay, rather than an adaptation of the 1957 Wyndham novel. It adds a few little details here and there (including a few touches of gore that seem wildly out of place), but never enough to give any indication why someone thought this was worth remaking. The eye effects, I guess? 30 years of special effects progress has finally made it possible to tell this story the way it was meant to be told… with the same light up eyes now in COLOR. Yes, you heard that right. COLOR.

Anyway, the plot is basically identical to the 1960 version: one day, out of the blue, every living creature in and around the small California town of Midwich suddenly falls asleep, wherever they are. Anyone entering the area immediately suffers the same fate. In six hours, they all awaken, except the ones who were driving, or tightrope walking, or juggling chainsaws or whatever. Or, in one agreeably gruesome case, standing over a grill. But mostly the citizens just wake up and go back to their lives, a little unsure what happened. Unsure, that is, until a few months later, when local doctor Chaffee (Christopher Reeve, in his final role before an accident left him paralyzed) starts to realize that ten of the town’s women (including virginal Melanie Roberts, [Meredith Salenger, LAKE PLACID]) seem to have been impregnated during the “blackout.” And when the kids are born, it quickly becomes clear that they are some kind of psychic, super-intelligent hivemind with matching Debbie Harry Sisqo Eminem Machine Gun Kelly hair and lite-brite eyes. And also that they’re evil.

This last detail is made clear surprisingly early on, probably the most significant alteration the 1995 script makes. The 1960 version plays out slowly, spending much of its runtime examining the townsfolks’ strained, confused reaction to this inexplicable phenomenon and never showing the children doing anything unambiguously hostile until over 50 minutes into a 77 minute runtime. Here, there’s no doubt; right from the cradle, these kids are causing mayhem, and pretty much everyone knows it. On one hand, that was probably the only way to approach this material in 1995; how tedious would it have been to drag it out and try to pretend the audience doesn’t already know that the creepy little kids with the glowing eyes are the bad guys? But on the other hand, the entire conflict of the original film is based on the adults’ wrestling with their uncertainty about what the kids are, what they want, and what to do with them. Here, all those questions are answered almost immediately, but the movie doesn’t really pose any alternate conflict to replace the one it kills off. The two movies proceed almost identically --even featuring nearly parallel scenes-- except that, having resolved the central conflict which the 1960 version uses to fuel nearly its entire plot within the first 20 minutes, the 1995 version finds it has nowhere to go, and just kind of sits there spinning its wheels, reinforcing the point over and over that yep, these kids sure are evil, all right. None of it is bad per se, but it sure is narratively inert, and it really makes you feel that runtime. Anything under two hours is hardly a difficult ask in this age where people routinely watch through entire seasons of TV in a single night, but it’s worth noting that the 1960 version leisurely works through its storyline in a slim 77 minutes, while Carpenter’s version has arguably less plot to work through, and still runs a full 22 minutes longer.

Part of that longer running time --a small part, but a notable one-- is devoted to a smattering of stepiece kill scenes, which was surely part of the marketing calculous of bringing Carpenter into the remake. The original has a relatively low body count --I recall only three victims-- but was certainly not above taking a sadistic pleasure in milking them for morbid thrills. The remake keeps all three deaths intact, and adds a few more of its own, including a nasty self-vivisection and a surprisingly huge gun battle (in the original, the townsfolk consider calling in the military, but dismiss the idea upon realizing the kids would just use their mind control to make the soldiers shoot each other. The remake, of course, is understandably curious as to what that would look like). As with revealing the kid’s malicious intentions early, this makes sense on the surface, and might in itself have been enough to justify a remake, if they had really committed to that approach. A pivot from Twilight Zone eeriness to giddy splatter would be weird, but would certainly embody a fresh approach to the material, made possible only in the intervening 35 years. 

Alas, then, that 1995’s VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED doesn’t really do that. There’s certainly more explicit gore than the original, but not nearly enough to give the film a reason for being, or clearly locate it in a particular mode of horror. It’s appreciated, but it’s not enough to justify the clash in tones which inevitably results when you throw five or six gimmicky death scenes into a screenplay essentially written in 1960. These are two distinct flavors of horror which do not mesh together comfortably at all. Haphazardly stitching one into the other blurs the film’s focus and heightens the sense of filmmakers trying to hedge their bets by throwing different things at the audience to see what sticks, instead of committing to one clear vision.

That same scatterbrained sense of good ideas indifferently applied carries over into the film’s themes, too. In the “Production Notes” on the DVD, Reeve reflects, “When they made [the original] in 1960, the evil alien, if you will, was Communism. This was the threat, the disease that could overtake this healthy American organism of liberty and democracy. With the demise of the Cold War, we don’t have that threat any more. But we have something else -- the indifference to violence. And the message in this film is the banality of violence, of evil. Death has no consequence, and metaphorically, we see that here as a kind of infection, which certainly exists in our culture today.”

Maybe so, which helps to elucidate the decision to portray the kids as blatantly evil right from the start, and to have pretty much everyone aware of that fact. It’s definitely no longer a metaphor for a subversion or invasion. But I’m less convinced the story lends itself well to the idea that it’s about indifference to violence. I mean, it is about that, I guess, in the sense that the parents spend so much time begging the kids to feel human emotion and empathy (a point touched upon in the original, but which is insisted upon here). But it’s not much of a metaphor since the aliens were just zapped onto Earth, and there’s no evidence they could be convinced to do anything other than murder us all, and our only hope is to kill them before they use their telepathic powers to have us all commit suicide. So what exactly is the message here? “Don’t be a ultra-powerful psychic sociopath?” OK. I’m not convinced it’s exactly an immaculate metaphor for creeping Communist menace either, but at least in 1960s England that threat was understood to come from outside, as an invading force. Carpenter certainly knows that indifference to violence isn’t some alien feeling being forced on humanity, it’s an impulse that comes from within us, as old as civilization, and so representing it with these invading others who are completely alien and incomprehensible to us just doesn’t really work. Consequently, the movie offers but doesn’t really commit to this reading, allowing it, like the setpiece kill scenes, to melt inconsequentially into its aimless wandering without providing any sense of direction.

Similarly, Carpenter himself offers a gendered reading of the remake: “The original movie and the novel were written from a masculine point of view. This was an opportunity to explore the female aspect of the story and their reaction to the situation.” I’ll grant the "female aspect of the story" could use some exploring; the 60’s version is so profoundly disinterested in what the women think that it actually has its protagonist patronizingly send his wife on vacation while he makes plans to (SPOILER) suicide bomb their kid. And for a movie which condemns the little monsters for lack of empathy, its curiosity about the human emotions evoked by this situation barely extends beyond its mild irritation that emotional women make it hard to think rationally about the problem. Even original director Wolf Rilla (CAIRO, and what a name!) agreed that, “We made [our] film at a period when the old male chauvinism was still very strong. John [Carpenter] has brought another element into [his film], one of feminism, which is quite right. One discusses these sorts of things more openly than we did in the 50’s and 60’s, when people would be uptight about sex and anything to do with it.”

Seems like a good idea, and there are definitely a bunch of women in the cast, but since none of these characters are very interesting, and we learn very, very little about what they’re thinking beyond the most basic platitudes, I don’t know that it really adds much. Certainly calling it feminist in any sense seems hard to defend. Maybe it would have been more shocking back in 1995 that the kids have a female leader (Lindsey Haun, SHROOMS, far and away the most committed and effective performance in the film), and there’s a cynical female doctor (Kirstie Alley, STAR TREK 2: THE WRATH OF KHAN and Operating Thetan Level 7)? A quick survey of contemporary reviews doesn’t give that impression, but what the hell, good thought, anyway.

 Carpenter is also said in the DVD extras to have added some theological rumination, but man, it’s just barely in there. I mean, they say bible verses, I guess. But it’s a long way from exploring the subject in any kind of meaningful way. After all, holy shit!, aliens and telepathy and mind control! The very existence of these things has enormous ramifications for our ideas about the soul, about morality, about death, about humanity’s place in the universe. But all the movie offers is a grim-looking Mark Hamill (JOHN CARPENTER’S BODY BAGS) reading a prayer about children. Just another example of how the movie is not lacking for content, but isn’t really ABOUT anything. It gives the impression of a film where some thought was put into what to do, but little effort was put into actually doing it.

Carpenter, even in the same interview he admits to not caring much about the movie, does claim that, “it has a very good performance from Christopher Reeve, so there’s some value in it.” It’d be kind of petty to quibble with something like that, especially given what happened to poor Reeve afterwords, but although there’s nothing wrong with his acting, I can’t help but notice that he, like nearly everyone in the film, is bizarrely miscast. It’s not his fault, really, it’s just that he is simply not believable as a real human. Come on, nobody is that ruggedly handsome, he looks like a cartoon prince who shows up at the end of a Disney movie. The stupid kids in the Sisqo wigs look more convincing. And they are, after all, kids -- pitting them against a literal superman is a damn strange dynamic, and having everyone else in the movie try to pretend he’s just some podunk country doctor and not some kind of adonis übermensch is even weirder.

            The rest of the cast is mostly a wash. Alley is also a truly befuddling choice for a cynical, vaguely sinister government agent, but it hardly matters because the role (which has only a tenuous parallel with the 1960 version) is vaguely written in the extreme, with the film unsure how to posit a character who confusingly vacillates between callused villain and minor second protagonist. And other than the A+ work from young Lindsey Haun as the childrens’ leader and spokesman, nobody else in the cast gets much to do. Linda Kozlowski and Meredith Salenger are both admirably committed to the single character trait they’re assigned, but can’t do much more. Michael Paré vanishes before he can leave an impression.

And then you’ve also got Mark Hamill in there. He’s really trying hard, but unfortunately it’s not much of a role, and it wouldn’t even really be worth mentioning at all except that remember, he’s Mark Fucking Hamill, so the fact that he’s standing around in the background of various scenes making us wish he was talking is kind of distracting. He plays the town priest, “Reverend George,” in a role which must surely have been meant for an older character actor. In fact, in this 2015 interview he claims he was brought into the production late, after David Warner, who originally had the part, dropped out. Warner would have been ideal for this kind of thing (although you’d still be left with a character who isn’t really given much to do), but Hamill, in 1995, was still too young and pretty to intuitively read as a fire-and-brimstone small-town country priest, and doesn’t have enough screen time to convince us with his acting. So it’s just weird.

The strange, self-defeating casting choices are, in a way, a perfect microcosm of the movie as a whole. They’re certainly interesting, and even give the impression that someone, somewhere, was trying to do something, but aren’t nearly effectively managed enough that you come away with a clear sense of what that something might be. Even Carpenter’s score (this time co-written with Kinks’ guitarist Dave Davies[!]) seems a little less focused than usual, wandering between unusually bombastic (but not especially memorable) marches and quiet minimalism without much sense of purpose.    

So in the end, I’m sorry to have to report that John Carpenter’s VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED is more interesting curiosity than chilling horror classic. “I had much higher hopes. The Wolf Rilla one is still the best,” Hamill would later judge. But still, it is a John Carpenter movie (it has George “Buck” Flowers in it and everything!), which alone is enough to demand your attention, and fuck, it’s got goddamn Mark Hamill and Superman going head-to-head against a posse of murderous alien telekinetic aryan Edgar Winter cosplayer children. Even if it never quite comes together into the swift kick in the teeth that it should be, you’d have to be a real asshole not to at least give it a try.

PS: Many reviews point out that it was filmed at the same sites in Inverness and Point Reyes, CA,  which also appeared in THE FOG. They mention this as though it’s just interesting trivia, and not hard scientific evidence that Inverness and Point Reyes, CA, are some kind of filmmaking Kryptonite for John Carpenter.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2018 CHECKLIST!

Searching For Bloody Pictures

    

TAGLINE	Beware The Children. So even the tagline is hardly trying.
TITLE ACCURACY	Has a pretty 1960s flavor to it, but I guess it’s better than the novel’s title, The Midwich Cuckoos
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	Yes, from the 1957 novel The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham
SEQUEL?	None, although the 1960 version has a sequel called CHILDREN OF THE DAMNED from 1964.
REMAKE?	Yes
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	USA
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Bad Seed, Psychic killer, Aliens
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	Christopher Reeves, Mark Hamill, Kirstie Alley (I guess?)
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	John Carpenter
NUDITY?	None
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	Women impregnated against their will, but it seems to be through some kind of outer space energy ray or something.
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	In the original, I remember the dog growls at the evil little kids, though I don’t specifically remember that happening here.
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	None
POSSESSION?	Yes, via mind-whammy
CREEPY DOLLS?	None
EVIL CULT?	None
MADNESS?	No
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	None
VOYEURISM?	None
MORAL OF THE STORY	COMMUNISTS ARE INFILTRATING OUR CHILDREN AND WE MUST KILL THEM!!!

            

  

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.