Zombie Nightmare

Zombie Nightmare (1986 / 7)

Dir. Jack Bravman, John Fasano (uncredited)

Written by John Fasano as "David Wellington"

Starring Adam West, Tia Carrere, Jon Mikl Thor, Shawn Levy

I’d been on the trail of ZOMBIE NIGHTMARE for years before I finally caught up with it, going back at least to 2014, when I discovered its existence after mistyping the search terms for HARD ROCK ZOMBIES. At the time, though, I simply couldn’t get ahold of a copy – couldn’t find it on pirate bay, wasn’t streaming, no DVD available, VHS copies on amazon running for more than the zero dollars I was willing to pay. I settled for its sister film, the delightful ROCK N’ ROLL NIGHTMARE, also released on video in 1987 (Wikipedia claims, with no citation, that ZOMBIE NIGHTMARE received a “limited release theatrically” in the US in in 1986; I have my doubts). Even aside from their analogous sobriquets, the films have much in common: both were shot in the Canadian suburbs around the same time, both were the creative brainchild of the underrated John Fasano (director of BLACK ROSES, THE JITTERS and ROCK N’ ROLL NIGHTMARE, who, despite receiving neither credit on-screen, seems to be generally regarded as the writer-director here), and, most importantly, both feature the involvement of a man named Jon Mikl Thor, bodybuilder, actor, former Mr. Canada, and “Legendary Rock Warrior” as he billed himself in his bands Thor (just Thor), Thor and the Imps, and, if his Wikipedia page is to believed, “Thor and the Ass Boys.”

ROCK N’ ROLL NIGHTMARE is a goddamn masterpiece of Z-movie goofiness and monster puppets which really took me by surprise when I blindly watched it after having failed to secure a copy of ZOMBIE NIGHTMARE back in 2014. So when its elusive zombie-themed brethern suddenly showed up out of the blue on Prime streaming –in a pristine HD print, no less!— of course I jumped at the opportunity. That’s the weird thing about the brave new world of streaming; in some ways, it’s probably made the job of the offbeat cinephile more difficult, turning films into transient, ephemeral things which can suddenly vanish from the world in the blink of an eye and be utterly inaccessible to anyone who lacks a real-world video store which held onto an increasingly rare physical copy. But on the other hand, every now and then wildly obscure, impossible-to-find stuff just shows up, a click of the finger away, apparently unaware that yesterday it was more recherché than unicorn steak. If that diminishes the thrill of the hunt somewhat, it does afford the pastime a giddy quality of capricious fate; apparently the universe would like me to see ZOMBIE NIGHTMARE now, one says with a shrug. Yesterday this would have been a Herculean task, today it’s instant and free. C’est la vie, apparently the quantum physicists were right and anything can happen at any time for no reason, and you might as well just surrender your free will to the fickle vagary of a random, meaningless universe where Trump is president and now, for some reason, ZOMBIE NIGHTMARE is just there, waiting to be watched.

This man is seconds from saying "sorry ma" with the highest possible volume of Canadian-ness 

 I guess the universe knew what it was doing this time, though. It turns out to be a damn good thing that it was so easy to watch, because it’s disappointingly boring. It would have been kind of a bummer to eventually get desperate and, like, order some Vietnamese bootleg DVD for $35 only to end up with this. Where ROCK N’ ROLL NIGHTMARE was packed to the gills with silly gimmicks, hair metal excess and a veritable menagerie of homicidal muppets, ZOMBIE NIGHTMARE offers fairly scant pleasures. There is, for example, only one zombie, and his rampage is hardly a nightmare unless you consider killing the five teenage hooligans who ran you over and fled the scene a “nightmare” instead of a “public service.”  

Still, credit for this: the script by Fasano (hiding behind the mysterious name "Dave Wellington" for reasons he claims have to do with the Canadian copyright law and not shame at having been associate with this debacle) is, like his ROCK N’ ROLL NIGHTMARE script, actually at least a little smarter and coherent than you would assume at first blush. It begins with something completely unexpected, anyway: some indeterminate number of years before the main events of the movie, a young African-American girl (Tracy Biddle, SNAKE EATER II: THE DRUG BUSTER) is walking home, only to be accosted by two racist punks (possibly Tony Blauer [nothing] and Mark Kulik [“boy in line” in the 1987 Tommy Lee Jones starring TV movie BROKEN VOWS], both of whom are just credited as “teenager”). Fortunately, there’s help nearby: stocky local baseball player William Washington (Fasano himself!) intervenes, only to receive a fatal stabbing from one of the young rascals as they make a getaway! Meanwhile, William’s young son Tony watches in horror.

Flash forward to today. Woah! Certainly not the way I was expecting a movie called ZOMBIE NIGHTMARE to begin. This rather shocking prologue of racist violence helps inform our understanding of why young Tony has by 1986 grown up to be a baseball-playing bodybuilding sweatpants aficionado played by Jon Mikl Thor (RECRUITS, INTERCESSOR: ANOTHER ROCK N’ ROLL NIGHTMARE). And it makes his willingness to put his life on the line in a Steven Seagal-esque* attempt to foil a grocery store robbery all the more psychologically rich, as we worry that history will repeat itself and this second-generation good Samaritan will suffer the same fate as his old man. But no, he tosses the miscreants out on their asses with a righteous professionalism that would make Patrick Swayze in ROADHOUSE proud, and it seems for a moment that this might bring some closure to this saga of multigenerational heroism. I mean, he doesn’t look like he’s thinking about it too deeply, or noticing the unmistakable patrilineal synchronicity he’s enacted. But then again, he doesn’t have much time to reflect, because about four seconds after foiling the robbery, he’s run over by an unrelated car and killed. Damn.

I guess he technically one-upped his dad by at least surviving til the end of the encounter, but still, one can understand why his mom (Francesca Bonasorsa, nothing) takes this turn of events pretty hard. “They won’t do this to me again!” she fumes. And she means it, because next thing you know she’s called in a favor; it seems that the young woman her husband died protecting all those years ago has grown into a Voodoo practitioner of some renown (Manuska Rigaud, nothing) and, with a little coaxing, is willing to resurrect the fallen lad as a vengeance-minded zombie who sometimes is (and sometimes is not) still played by Jon Mikl Thor.

Look, I'm not going to try and claim this is not racist, but all things considered, it's probably as minimally racist as it was possible to be with this premise. At least she's the good guy!

 Meanwhile, the offending teens go about their life, amazingly unconcerned about the little vehicular homicide they’ve perpetrated. Despite our intimacy with the now-decimated Washington family, they will be something sort of like protagonists from now on, and the only people who could reasonably claim to be afflicted by zombie nightmares of any kind. This imparts upon the movie something of a slasher structure, with a central killer gradually murdering his way through a list of the people who wronged him. That's an unusual move for a zombie movie (and one which anticipates the plot of I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER by an entire decade, not that this is exactly something to feel overwhelmingly proud of, though to hear him tell it in the commentary, Fasano definitely does), and one which in retrospect may have been somewhat ill-advised, because a slasher lives and dies on its kills, which are uniformly underwhelming here. And as is tradition in that venerable subgenre, the movie is at its worst when we're enduring endless scenes of its obnoxious victims, which in this case makes up a downright indefensible portion of the runtime. 

For the most part these victims are too shockingly bland to be worth discussing, although two of the actors portraying them subsequently proved noteworthy: the role of Jane A. Finalgirl is played by future Hollywood superstar Tia Carrere (WAYNE’S WORLD, TRUE LIES) in her first role (despite being so much more attractive than anyone else that it's functionally destabilizing for the movie, she still barely registers in a part which barely qualifies as a role), and, even weirder, future Middlebrow Hollywood Hack director Shawn Levy (CHEAPER BY THE DOZEN, NIGHT AT THE MUSEUM) appears as the most intolerable asshole of the group. Even with Carrere in there, though, the idea of spending a whole movie focused on these dipshits is laughable, so once the teens start getting bumped off one by one, the movie offers a new possible protagonist (at more than 40 minutes in!), police detective Frank Sorrell (Frank Dietz,THE JITTERS, BLACK ROSES and ROCK N’ ROLL NIGHTMARE, also a longtime Disney animator, with various credits on HERCULES, MULAN, TARZAN, and FANTASIA 2000, among others). And here the movie gets very slightly more interesting, because Sorrell has a vague suspicion that his shady boss Captain Churchman (Adam West, among other things, episodes of The Love Boat and The Adventures of Pete and Pete) would prefer this whole thing to just go away, and isn’t interested in getting to the truth.

Unfortunately the zombie killings themselves are pretty dull stuff, mostly bloodless affairs which grind endlessly on as the incredibly inept victims ineffectually try to get away from a slow, stumbling assailant in matte gray makeup and uncomfortably revealing sweatpants. The first two kills, at least, have the advantage of taking place in some sort of bizarre dystopian modernist nightmare rec center, which affords a touch of actual unsettling ambiance which is otherwise almost entirely lacking. But when even the murder of the biggest jerk in Canada --by impalement with a baseball bat while he’s attempting to sexually assault a waitress, no less!— feels perfunctory and bloodless, I think it’s time to admit you don’t really have a movie, here. It’s nice to see West dutifully show up every now and again (even if he’s visibly reading his lines off the paper in front of him in one scene) but a few clips of Adam West and a few more of a pale-faced guy in sweatpants stumbling after a handful of screaming teenagers does not a Zombie Nightmare make. It’s not even colorful enough to be worth laughing at its incompetence, because for the most part there’s just nothing much going on.

I guess this is as good a time as any to mention that this film is probably most known for the famously savage reception it got on Mystery Science Theater 3000.

 Credit where it’s due, though; just like ROCK N’ ROLL NIGHTMARE, it ends with a bit of a twist which retroactively makes it seem, if not smarter, at least more intentional than one would be led to believe based on the meandering nothing that makes up most of the runtime. I guess it would be a spoiler of sorts to explain exactly what’s going on, but suffice to say a number of seemingly random details end up paying off in a way which is, if hardly mind-blowing, at least narratively satisfying. On one hand, being impressed by a film merely for having a baseline functional story is the height of damning with faint praise. But on the other hand, try finding me a $100,000,000-budgeted film today which can meet that low standard. For all ZOMBIE NIGHTMARE’s dull, time-wasting tomfoolery, at least it seems like it wasn’t just made up on the spot as it was filmed. Or at least not entirely so. In something this low-rent, that’s actually sort of miraculous, or at the very least not something you could have reasonably expected. It wouldn’t even have occurred to me to hold it against ZOMBIE NIGHTMARE if it had a random hodgepodge of plotlines that went nowhere. I probably wouldn’t even have noticed. So even if this is by far the weakest work in the Fasano cannon, at least we must again take note that he was trying harder than he had to by any reasonable metric for z-movie genre schlock.

In the Jon Mikl Thor cannon, this also leaves a little to be desired, particularly for people who enjoy seeing Mr. Thor on-screen. Apparently production began with a different Canadian bodybuilder in the title role (a Mr. “Peewee Piemonte” if IMDB is to be believed, a prolific stuntman and sometimes actor [UNDER SEIGE, BATMAN FOREVER, WEEKEND AT BERNIE’S II])** and obviously they shot a good bit of the zombie footage before he departed, because maybe as much as half the zombie shots are obviously a different actor with short, dark hair instead of Thor’s flowing hair metal mane (he also has a less prominent package, making the jarring continuity something of a mixed blessing). But if the movie shortchanges you on the Thor zombie action, it makes up for it with more Thor in every other part of the movie. Aside from intermittently playing the zombie, Thor did everything but cater the meals on the film; he wrote and performed the incidental music (under the clever nom du guerre “Thor and his Thorkestra”), and produced the extensive and inappropriately hard-rocking soundtrack, which at first glance seems to be a varied rouges gallery of unknown Canadian metal bands, until you look at the credits and see that Thor himself wrote, produced, and appears on over half of them.

Sometimes it’s under his own name (as in the epic prog anthem “Rebirth” by Thor) sometimes it’s in disguise (“Dead Things” by The Things and “Zombie Life” by Knighthawk have the same lineup as Thor’s band), sometimes only as a producer (“I’m Dangerous!” by Death Mask, produced by Jon Mikl Thor and Steve Price), sometimes in rather more esotetic ways (The “Pantera” who sings “Midnight Man” is not, in fact, the Pantera you’re thinking of, but rather Thor’s wife Rusty Hamilton, herself an actress*** and nude model who also sang backup for Thor).**** In fact, one of the few tracks which does not feature Jon Mikl Thor is also the one you would figure would be too expensive for the movie – Motörhead’s “Ace of Spades,” which inexplicably plays during the opening credits. I don’t really know why they would feel the need to begin a movie which is in no way rock and roll (and, in fact, begins at least a decade in the past) with the hard-driving sound of Motörhead’s most recognizable single,*****  but it definitely imparts upon the movie an unearned sense of credibility for it to fail to live up to.

Anyway, the whole thing is kinda a debacle and an inauspicious start for all involved. Still, especially after listening to the commentary with Fasano, Dietz, and an over-the-phone Thor, it’s hard not to feel at least a little well-disposed to such a scrappy little film, made by people dedicated enough to just replace their lead zombie halfway through and keep moving forward. It’s a movie without much whammy to speak of, but with no shortage of charming, handmade oddness. That’s not enough to keep its unassuming 89 minutes from dragging a bit, but at least it’s something. And unlike most regional horror flicks which were shot for less than $180,000 (most of which, reportedly, went to West), this time we have the added comfort of knowing that most of those involved don’t need to settle for a patronizing “well, at least you tried.” This movie didn’t really work out, but they moved on to better things. Let that be a lesson to you: never give up. Sure, a lot of times life just doesn’t work out the way you want, and you end up making (or watching) a ZOMBIE NIGHTMARE. But if you stick with it, just around the corner could be your ROCK N’ ROLL NIGHTMARE! Amazon may want to convince us that the world is random and meaningless and anything can happen for no reason, but good old fashion misplaced optimism, feckless ambition, and hopeless persistence can still pay off in the end. And if not, at least you can come back as a zombie and brutalize your enemies.

  

** Weirdly, Seagal will remain a theme here. Not only is it an extremely Seagalesque move to open a movie by foiling a small-time retail robbery, but Thor claims that Seagal himself taught him how to stage fight scenes! And, as we will discover, the "other" Thor who appears on-screen had his own run-ins with Seagal as a stuntman on several of his films.

** Including, according to IMDB, in JACOB’S LADDER (uncredited), THE GODFATHER PART III (uncredited), OUT FOR JUSTICE, UNDER SEIGE and… NEWSIES?

*** She appears as “The Seductress” in ROCK N’ ROLL NIGHTMARE, and has a stunts credit in the 1992 Willem Dafoe action flick WHITE SANDS.

**** Please note the seemingly unimportant detail that the soundtrack was recorded, in part, at Ontario-based Triton Studios. This turns out to be vital information for your understanding of ROCK N’ ROLL NIGHTMARE, because in that movie Thor’s band is called “Triton” and his character is named “Jon Mikl Triton.” There. Now you know something.

***** Website horrormetalsounds.com reports that “John Fasano originally wanted to use another Motorhead song Killed By Death as he thought it would fit the movie better, but Lemmy insisted they use Ace Of Spades." I don’t know why he would insist on that, but who am I to tell Lemmy his business? Anyway, it definitely makes both the movie and the soundtrack initially feel way more legit than they actually are.

               

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2019 CHECKLIST!

For Richer or Horror

TAGLINE	And Here’s A Zombie Tale That Will Give You The Creeps. I appreciate the tagline starting with “and,” a startling bit of grammar-bending ambition which imparts the sense that you and the poster are old chums already deep in conversation.
TITLE ACCURACY	There is a zombie, but “Nightmare” is sure pushing it.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	No, good god, no.
SEQUEL?	None
REMAKE?	None.
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	Canada
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Zombie, revenge thriller
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	I can’t in good conscience call Adam West an A-lister, or even Tia Carrere, but it’s kinda impressive to have em both in here.
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	John Fasano
NUDITY?	None.
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	One teen meets his end while assaulting a woman, although it’s pretty tame
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	None
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	Yup
POSSESSION?	No
CREEPY DOLLS?	None.
EVIL CULT?	No
MADNESS?	No
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	Thor into Zombie into different guy zombie
VOYEURISM?	Some zombie-vision, as you might expect for something with a budget of O
MORAL OF THE STORY	You gotta learn to walk before you learn to ROCK N ROLL NIGHTMARE.

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.