- Directed by Roger Spottiswoode
- Written by T.Y. Drake, Daniel Grodnik, Justin Roscoe
- Stars Ben Johnson, Jamie Lee Curtis, Hart Bochner
- Run Time: 1 Hour, 37 Minutes
- Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUnXVqQaPag
Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone
What if you took “Halloween” and put it on a train with lots of magic tricks and silly costumes? Although it’s a pretty solid 1980 horror film, it’s starting to look a little dated for modern viewers.
Synopsis
It’s New Year’s Eve at the frat house. We meet various annoying teenagers, one of whom is Alana, who looks suspiciously like Jamie Lee Curtis. They’ve set something up where Kenny the nerdy kid is supposed to go to her room and have sex. Instead, they’ve substituted a corpse from the medical school. Kenny is not amused. Credits roll.
Three years later, the whole gang is taking a trip by train. We see that it’s mostly the same group of annoying kids. The conductor complains that there’s no radio on the train. As they all board the train, we see that the class clown has already been murdered on the station platform and rolled under the train’s wheels.
It’s a New Year’s Eve thing, so lots of people are wearing masks. Doc tells some freshmen the story of what happened to Kenny in their freshman year. Alana comes in, and she’s not proud of the prank; poor Kenny wound up in the hospital. She still regrets that.
Unbeknownst to Alana and Doc, the other seniors are being killed one by one. There’s a magician who entertains the passengers. The conductor does some crappy tricks as well. Doc wonders, “Who hired a magician? I didn’t hire a magician.” Meanwhile, the conductor finds a mutilated body in the restroom. When he brings in the other conductor to look, the blood is gone and so is the body.
The conductor finds Michy’s body and shows it to Alana. Doc finds Mo’s body. Doc pulls the emergency brake cord, but the train doesn’t slow down. The conductor races to the front of the train, but there’s no one there. He stops the train manually and wonders what happened to the engineer.
With the train stopped, they do a car-to-car search for the killer. Alana tells Doc that she thinks it might be Kenny from that prank. That means the two of them are all that’s left as his targets. Doc locks himself in a cabin and the killer gets him next.
Alana tells the conductor that the magician is the killer. The train gets back underway, but now everyone knows there’s a killer aboard. The conductor locks the magician in a car by himself, but he is a magician after all. The conductor goes back in after him and the magician is gone.
The killer comes after Alana, but she stabs him in the back. He chases her, and she screams. She locks herself in a cage, and he tries to get in, but she stabs him again. She ends up pushing him off the train.
Of course, that’s not the end of it. We see the masked killer through a window, clinging to the side of the train. Alana soon finds the magician’s body— guess it wasn’t him after all. She’s soon face to face with Kenny, who had been masquerading as the magician’s assistant. The conductor whacks him with a shovel, knocks him out of the train for real this time, off a very high bridge, and he falls onto the ice, through the ice, and washes down the river. That was pretty thorough!
Commentary
I like the conversations between the engineer and conductor about the future of rail travel. Passenger trains are still a thing but not the futuristic vision the engineer had.
These are all medical students, so why is only one of the guys named Doc?
What’s up with the magic tricks? How many college medical students would want to hire a stage magician to perform on their train ride? Was David Copperfield that big of a draw in 1980 that they felt the need to shoehorn him into a horror movie?
This is a fairly by-the-numbers slasher film. This time around, the killer puts on the costume of his most recent victim, so he looks different for each death. The whole thing being set on a train is an interesting feature as well. Otherwise, it’s looking a little dated. It’s not exactly a train wreck, but it is slower-paced than a real passenger train.