Movie Review: Terror Train (1980)
The movie begins in an outdoor New Year’s Eve party with a bunch of college kids in a medical school fraternity and some women. Alana Maxwell (Jamie Lee Curtis) is convinced to play a prank on a young Kenny (Derek MacKinnon). She convinces him to go inside and come upstairs, where she hides behind a curtain. Unknown to Alana, some of the fraternity brothers have placed a corpse in the bed, which freaks Kenny out.
Three years later, members of the same fraternity and sorority take a train ride in order to have a New Year’s Eve costume party. They still play pranks, particularly Ed (Howard Busgang). As the students prepare to board the train, the conductor (Ben Johnson, The Last Picture Show) has a conversation with a worker at the train station that reveals the train has no radio.
While they board, Ed gets a sword stuck through his torso, and everyone of course thinks it’s a prank. When he’s alone, the killer takes his clothes and his Groucho Marx mask, and boards the train, placing Ed’s body underneath it. Aboard, people are having a good time dancing and drinking, and real-life magician David Copperfield laments to his assistant about performing in front of such a rowdy audience. His inclusion is odd, but memorable, and makes this movie stand out a bit.
Some of the younger students bring up the story of what happened three years ago, Alana’s boyfriend, Mo (Timothy Webber) and Doc (Hart Bochner) begin to tell the story when Alana interrupts them and mentions that it sent Kenny to a mental hospital.
The killer, dressed as Ed, is going off with a woman who thinks he is Ed, when he’s interrupted by Jackson (Anthony Sherwood), who is killed by having his head smashed against a mirror.
Alana finds out that Doc had been the mastermind behind the prank that went too far three years ago, which upsets her, because for years Doc had told her it was her, I think as a way to get her not to dislike Doc so much. It seems like a really manufactured way to create conflict, and it’s essentially forgotten the second David Copperfield starts performing to the students.
Doc mentions that he didn’t hire a magician, but Mo shrugs it off, assuming someone else did.
Doc and Mo go off with a couple women that aren’t their girlfriends, and Doc finds Jackson’s body in his stupid lizard suit. He takes the brakeman to go see it, but the blood has been cleaned up and the man in the lizard suit is moving, though not speaking. They help him up, and Doc’s girlfriend takes him to go sleep with him, but whoever is in that lizard suit kills her.
David Copperfield starts coming on to Alana, until Doc tells her that Mo is hoping to talk to her. Mo, of course, is with another very topless woman.
The conductor finds the other dead body. When Alana is on her way to see Mo, she runs into the conductor, who takes her away and tells her that her friend is dead. She eventually goes and sees the body, and starts freaking out.
Meanwhile, David Copperfield continues to perform and show up the skeptical Doc. Mo is angry at Doc for telling Alana he had wanted to see her when he was with another woman, but he didn’t get caught. While watching Copperfield perform, Mo notices that Doc is unresponsive and presumably dead, and he goes to try and help him, and ends up coming up to Alana, who tells him that his girlfriend has died.
The conductor notices that the brakeman didn’t hit the brakes when he should have and rushes to stop the train. With the train now stopped, the conductor realizes that the killer must have gotten two of the workers. Everyone begins getting off and the porters begin their search of the train, armed with an axe, while the conductor investigates everyone outside.
Alana tells Doc that it must be Kenny, which Doc thinks is ridiculous. Alana mentions that she had gone to see Kenny at the hospital, but she wasn’t allowed to because he was so disturbed, and apparently killed somebody.
Doc and Alana get back on the train and lock themselves in a cabin, and Doc pulls out a yearbook and flips to a page that mentions Kenny is a magician. Alana leaves the cabin to go help their friends, and in the most tense scene of the movie, Doc starts searching all throughout the cabin for Kenny. He sees the magician’s assistant’s red dress crumpled up in the corner, and is attacked, getting his throat slit.
Everyone gets back on the train because it’s too cold to wait outside, and the train starts up. Alana finds the conductor and tells him she knows who it is. They go back to Doc’s cabin and find Doc’s body, beheaded.
The conductor takes the magician’s assistant and once he finds out where David Copperfield is, he locks off that car. He then goes to search that car with a few other workers.
Meanwhile, the killer gets into Alana’s cabin and goes to strike her only to fall for a dummy that she had covered in a blanket. She stabs him in the back and runs, being chased by the axe-handling killer, now wearing Doc’s monk costume and some random mask.
Going in between cars, Alana is able to throw the killer off, but he’s able to hold on, unbeknownst to the others who have now come to Alana’s rescue.
Alana finds David Copperfield’s body and runs to the conductor to tell him, but it turns out it’s the killer wearing a mask and the brakeman’s uniform. He takes off the mask, revealing himself to be the magician’s assistant in drag. He forces Alana to kiss him, and after she does, he reacts the same way he had when he saw the corpse three years ago, freaking out. The conductor comes in and hits him with the shovel, knocking him off the train to his death.
I liked this movie more than I was expecting. It may take a while to really get going, but it has some well executed scares, with the scene of Doc searching the cabin and the killer trapping Alana really standing out. Jamie Lee Curtis is really good in this. Maybe not Halloween good, but definitely better than Halloween II or Prom Night Jamie Lee Curtis.
The movie has too many characters and too much character drama that doesn’t really pay off. That’s probably the weakest aspect of the movie. All the character stuff seems like a distraction from the well crafted scares, and that’s definitely disappointing. Still, the scares are well done. It’s a tense movie.
Rating: 6/10
