Terror Train (1980)

I came across Terror Train while looking through the Wikipedia page for New Year's Evil. A quote referenced Terror Train as the better of the two New Year's Eve slashers released in 1980. I agree, with the stipulation it's a very low bar, and if said bar were placed much higher Terror Train would have driven into it: "better" does not mean "good," at least in my opinion. That said, this movie certainly has its defenders, and I can appreciate at least some of what they see in it. The movie has some solid lighting and cinematography (particularly early on, when we're presented with some gorgeously atmospheric shots of the exterior of the titular train). It also features a young David Copperfield in a surprisingly significant role as a magician.

The real star, however, is Jamie Lee Curtis, whose casting makes it pretty obvious what movie this is attempting to replicate. For what it's worth, producer Daniel Grodnik received permission from John Carpenter and Debra Hill to make what he envisioned as "Halloween on a train," foreshadowing a similar approach to action movies post-Die Hard (a holiday tradition, I guess).

Before I get into the premise (to limited extent there is one beyond "slasher on a train"), I should note this is one of those situations where the holidays feel particularly extraneous. This is almost entirely set on New Year's Eve, but the movie makes very little use of that. There were certainly opportunities to tie the date into the theme, but I didn't feel like there was much interest in doing so. Aside from a minor plot point establishing it was too cold for everyone to just get off the damn train, the only tangible connection to the holiday was justifying a costume party. While there's precedent for New Year's costume parties, there's obviously a better option... but I guess you can only borrow so much from Halloween before you've crossed a line, permission or not.

That said, the lighting does incorporate holiday lights to give key moments an eerie glow, so that's a nice touch. But if you're looking for a horror movie that plays with the New Year's setting, you're better off looking elsewhere.

The movie itself is your garden-variety revenge slasher, where the main characters did something awful a few years earlier, resulting in their victim being driven insane and returning to kill them one by one. To be fair, I'm sure that was less of an obvious cliche in 1980 than it is now. In this case, the "something awful" was a fraternity prank where a young member was lured to a bedroom under the pretense of losing his virginity, only to find himself in bed with a cadaver stolen from the university biology department.

This was all masterminded by Doc, the resident prankster played by Hart Bochner, who'd go on to play Ellis in Die Hard eight years later (honestly, I didn't even recognize him). The victim, Kenny, is played by Derek MacKinnon, who lacked any experience on screen and was selected for a background performing in drag (I'd apologize for giving away the twist, but this one is really obvious). Curtis plays Alana, the girl tasked with luring Kenny into the trap, which she's felt guilty about ever since. And the other three students involved... barely get any meaningful development. Even Alana's boyfriend, who isn't killed until late into the movie and has a decent amount of screentime, never really gets fleshed out beyond "generic, mediocre guy."

The movie's only other significant roles are "The Magician" (Copperfield) and the train's aging conductor, Carne, played by Ben Johnson, who was well known at the time for a background in Westerns. Here, he essentially serves as the default detective trying to figure out what's happening and stop the killer - we were still a few years from allowing the final girl to save herself.

Other than that, you've got around forty or fifty drunk college kids wearing costumes on a vintage train they've rented as an unconventional party location. There are a handful of other train personnel, but they don't really do much (nor do the kids). That's the premise and setup. As for the plot, well... there isn't much of one.

The killer's strategy is to kill his victims, hide the bodies, then use their costumes to get close to his next target. It takes a while for anyone to catch on - eventually Carne starts finding bodies, Alana figures out that Kenny must be behind it, and then it's a race to figure out who the killer is or where he's hiding. When she learns Kenny had a background in magic, she concludes he must be the magician, which is kind of funny to those of us watching because it is clearly, obviously the magician's assistant. Like, even with the movie bending over backward to shoot the assistant at a distance and keep the character out of the center of the frame, it's impossible to miss. Hell, those choices make it more obvious - the point of a "lovely assistant" in magic is traditionally to distract the audience, so when they're having Copperfield distract us from his assistant while performing, it's a pretty big clue something's up.

Speaking of Copperfield's magic, they let him do some cool card stuff that's genuine, but the larger effects - including a couple impossible disappearances and teleportations - are just accomplished with camera cuts, which is one of my pet peeves. Unless a movie is presenting stage magic as genuine, supernatural magic, I'm a believer the tricks should at least be possible as presented. I'm actually fine with a few cuts or visual effects to cover for actors playing magicians, but you can't have someone instantly teleport across a crowded, ungimmicked room and present it as a trick.

It bothers me even more here, since the whole movie's built around misdirection and disguise. The best trick up the movie's sleeve is that the killer's whole game is basically a trick: shifting between disguises, keeping everyone in the dark as to what's going on, then leaving us wondering how it was accomplished. Using obvious trick photography undermines that idea.

That said, Copperfield famously used trick photography to accomplish some of his most famous illusions, so maybe I'm overreacting.

At any rate, the big reveal here, as I've already mentioned, is the killer isn't the magician but instead the assistant. Again, I found this absurdly obvious, which is only an issue because the movie structures this as a major twist, including flashbacks to illustrate the trick. It's also worth noting this really doesn't seem all that significant. It's a plot point that they isolate the magician from the rest of the party when they believe he's guilty, but even if you somehow bought into this you'd still find it implausible that no one considered the possibility his trusted assistant might be implicated.

Yeah, I know: I'm not supposed to analyze slashers logically. Characters doing stupid shit in these movies is par for the course (the number of times Carne tries to keep Alana safe by putting her in an unsecured, unoccupied train car borders on the ridiculous). It's part of the genre, and so on and so forth. But I feel like if the movie's hinging its twist on a case of concealed identity, the logic of said concealed identity should make some sense.

At any rate, in the last act Alana fights the killer several times while they're donning various disguises. Her goal is always to get away, so even when she gets the upper hand (which she does several times), she never picks up something (like a crow bar) and incapacitates him. Eventually, they struggle between cars, and Kenny falls to his death.

OR DOES HE? Actually, he inexplicably holds one and manages to crawl around the outside of the train for yet another final confrontation. Here, he forces Alana to kiss him, mirroring the opening when she lured him into bed with the cadaver with the same instruction. He then has a mental breakdown, which gives Carne time to run in, hit with a shovel, and send him falling out of the train to his death. Again. It seems to stick this time, since we see him drop a few hundred feet, smash into the edge of some ice, then get swept away by the freezing water. The movie ends abruptly after.

So. What the hell was that all about?

Well, if I'm being generous, I might say it's a cautionary tale against bullying in general and hazing in particular. That was, after all, the precipitating incident that led to all this, and Alana at least knows what they did was wrong. Still, the movie doesn't devote much time to this idea: the prologue is only a few minutes long, and - aside from Doc being a complete asshole - that theme isn't really expanded upon.

The movie is also clearly playing with disguise, misdirection, and illusion. And gender seems to be woven into those ideas, which at the very least has some interesting implications. If you're feeling really generous, you could interpret the movie as a statement on the ethereal nature of gender, but - again - I'm not sure I buy that. There's no real indication being the assistant is anything more to Kenny than a disguise like the others he wears throughout the movie, so it's not really exploring an aspect of his personality so much as a trick he's using. That said, it's probably for the best that the movie's villain isn't trans: that community gets demonized by this subgenre too often. 

On the whole, this one didn't work for me, though it was fun seeing Copperfield with an sizeable role in a slasher (and even more so because he was game for having his character killed off). I should also note this was directed by Roger Spottiswoode, who'd go on to become a major action director in the '90s (including making Tomorrow Never Dies, which I consider the best of the Brosnan Bond films). This certainly has its merits - I really did like the atmosphere, cinematography, and the creepy mask the killer wears towards the end. It's far from the worst knock-offs trying to replicate Halloween or Black Christmas, but I wouldn't rank it at the top of the scale, either. Die-hard slasher fans will certainly want to check this out, but the rest of us are probably better off sticking with the handful that withstood the test of time.