01 April, 2011

WI Film Fest 2011: Night Train to Terror





God and Satan sit at a table aboard an old train as the cosmos flies by in the window. They are engaged in a heady debate about free will, good vs. evil, and other metaphysical heavyweights. It may sound like a scene from a Jostein Gaarder novel but an adjacent car full of young people in garish 80s outfits singing a terrible pop song and break dancing means only one thing: I was on the Night Train to Terror at the Wisconsin Film Festival.

Released in 1985, Night Train to Terror retrofits three even lesser-known horror flicks into one god-awful piece of schlock. As the kids are boppin' away in their parachute pants, oversized tops, and Swatches, God and Lucifer argue over good and evil by viewing the fates of three individuals. These sequences were culled from other films making the scenes on the train glorified bumper material.

The first story which follows Harry Billings into the sinister world of an insane asylum qua abattoir. Poor Harry is brainwashed into delivering pulchritudinous blonds to the sadistic doctors who run the joint and whose purpose is to look nice while topless and writhing on a gurney. After God and Satan ponder the implication of Billings' fate, we're off to witness the inner sanctum of a death club wherein members play ever more elaborate variations of Russian roulette. The variation of The Pit and the Pendulum involving everyone in their sleeping bags while a wrecking ball swings above them had some good skull crunch. The terminal story involves a cop investigating the death of an elderly Holocaust survivor. This naturally leads to a young man with expertly feathered hair who hasn't aged a day since the late 19th century and has spent most of the intervening time calling Germany home. Richard Moll played the heavy in the first story and he reappears here as a proto-Richard Dawkins spreading the good word of atheism. Ahem.

Night Train to Terror is a good lesson on the power of editing to take matters from bad to worst. And let's not forget the Claymation…

The film was prefaced with a couple trailers. One for Blood Hook which was shot up in Hayward and is also playing at the festival this year and the other for C.H.U.D.. Much to my shame, I recognized the latter right away having seen it multiple times on cable back in the mid-80s.



UPDATE: Speaking of C.H.U.D., I see that it's going to get a DVD and Blu-Ray release from Criterion. (Ahem.)

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