Night Train to Terror (1985) from Tuna
Night Train to Terror is a horror trilogy. Each of the three stories in this film has been edited down from a discrete full-length movie, and the unrelated tales are tied together by some new footage consisting of conversations between God and Satan on a doomed train. To pass the time before the upcoming train wreck, The Biggest Kahuna and the Price of Darkness are arguing over the souls of the people in each of the stories.
  • The first story has been released as Marilyn Alive, or Behind Bars, or Scream Your Head Off, and is about a bogus mental hospital that kidnaps and drugs people, mostly women, then harvests their body parts through some painful vivisection performed by Bull from Night Court. A man is hypnotized into helping them recruit female victims by seduction. When the powers-that-be forget his injection, he has a change of heart. Nifty little ending to this one. Score one for God.
  • The second section, originally titled The Death Wish Club, has a young woman led into porn by a ruthless character. When a man visits his old fraternity and sees one of her films, he must have her. He tracks her down, and wins her heart, but her keeper is loath to let her go. His solution? To get them into his favorite game, where everyone puts themselves into a near-death experience. True love wins out in the end. Score another for God.
  • The third tale is an excerpt from Cataclysm, which had already been re-edited into Satan's Supper and The Nightmare that Never Ends. I don't know if any of the edits of this one made a lot of sense, but this one does not, and is full of bad Claymation effects as well. A female doctor is charged with defeating a demon, Satan's eternally youthful agent on earth, by cutting out his heart and trapping it in a box made from the True Cross. This looks like the same box I used to store my baseball cards, which explains why they were all replaced one day with holy cards. All these years I had been blaming my mom! The main story is complicated by sub-plots involving her husband's denial of God, an elderly Nazi hunter after the same immortal demon, and a determined policeman. God cheats in the end of this one and grants everyone mercy, probably because He couldn't follow the plot any better than we could. Three strikes, Satan, you are outta here.

I feel that the shortening of each story, while causing some confusion, probably helped this material, since there wasn't time for any segment to get boring enough to spoil the intrinsic bad movie vibe.

During the cutaways to the framing story, a bad rock band plays their one and only song again and again, repeating "dance with me, dance with me" ad infinitum while breakdancers gambol and cavort around them, 80s MTV style. These entertainers are also passengers on the night train to terror, one car down from Jehovah and Lucifer. Since everyone in the MTV crowd will die in the upcoming wreck, God and Satan debate the rockers' afterlife destination. Given the quality of the song, and the fact that the singers and breakdancers are a bunch of wusses wearing headbands and leg warmers, I vote with Satan on this one.

Despite their irritating music, we are just a bit touched by the fact that the musicians will all die, simply because they weren't even supposed to be on the Night Train to Terror. The station agent left his hearing aid home that evening, and they asked for tickets on the Night Train to Terre Haute.

Such is Kismet.

 

Cast notes:

  • Check out the IMDb page for the guy who allegedly plays Satan. (God plays himself!) According to the amazon.com page, both God and Satan are actually played by veteran character actor Cameron Mitchell, who remains uncredited for those roles, but also appears in a credited role in one of the segments.
  • All of the actresses have multiple credits at IMDb, but are all actually for this same film in different incarnations.
  • The guy who played "Bull" on Night Court appears in two of the three segments.
 

DVD INFO

  • No features except the original trailer
  • the transfer is anamorphically enhanced, and is not especially vivid

 

NUDITY REPORT

  • In the first section, we have breast exposure from Lisa Watkins, Micki Anne Corbin and Meredith Kennedy as victims, and full frontal from an unidentified actress.

  • Meredith Haze, as the women in the second tale, does full frontal and rear nudity.

  • There is no nudity in section three.

The Critics Vote ...

  • This is an excellent and amusing review.

The People Vote ...

The meaning of the IMDb score: 7.5 usually indicates a level of excellence equivalent to about three and a half stars from the critics. 6.0 usually indicates lukewarm watchability, comparable to approximately two and a half stars from the critics. The fives are generally not worthwhile unless they are really your kind of material, equivalent to about a two star rating from the critics, or a C- from our system. Films rated below five are generally awful even if you like that kind of film - this score is roughly equivalent to one and a half stars from the critics or a D on our scale. (Possibly even less, depending on just how far below five the rating is.

Our own guideline:

  • A means the movie is so good it will appeal to you even if you hate the genre.
  • B means the movie is not good enough to win you over if you hate the genre, but is good enough to do so if you have an open mind about this type of film. Any film rated B- or better is recommended for just about anyone. In order to rate at least a B-, a film should be both a critical and commercial success. Exceptions: (1) We will occasionally rate a film B- with good popular acceptance and bad reviews, if we believe the critics have severely underrated a film. (2) We may also assign a B- or better to a well-reviewed film which did not do well at the box office if we feel that the fault lay in the marketing of the film, and that the film might have been a hit if people had known about it. (Like, for example, The Waterdance.)
  • C+ means it has no crossover appeal, but will be considered excellent by people who enjoy this kind of movie. If this is your kind of movie, a C+ and an A are indistinguishable to you.
  • C means it is competent, but uninspired genre fare. People who like this kind of movie will think it satisfactory. Others probably will not.
  • C- indicates that it we found it to be a poor movie, but genre addicts find it watchable. Any film rated C- or better is recommended for fans of that type of film, but films with this rating should be approached with caution by mainstream audiences, who may find them incompetent or repulsive or both. If this is NOT your kind of movie, a C- and an E are indistinguishable to you.
  • D means you'll hate it even if you like the genre. We don't score films below C- that often, because we like movies and we think that most of them have at least a solid niche audience. Now that you know that, you should have serious reservations about any movie below C-. Films rated below C- generally have both bad reviews and poor popular acceptance.
  • E means that you'll hate it even if you love the genre.
  • F means that the film is not only unappealing across-the-board, but technically inept as well.

 

Based on this description, this film is a C-. (Watchable for the "bad movie vibe")

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