Monday, February 28, 2011

'Night Train to Terror' is terrible

Night Train to Terror (aka "Shiver" and "The Nightmare Never Ends") (1985)
Starring: Richard Moll, John Phillip Law, Arthur M. Braham, Cameron Mitchell, Gabriel Whitehorse, and Robert Bristol
Directors: John Carr and Philip Marschak
Rating: Three of Ten Stars

God and Satan are riding on a doomed night train, reviewing what souls will be going to Heaven and what souls will be going to Hell. Meanwhile, a really lame pop band and its dancers are rehearsing in a well-appointed freight car.


"Night Train to Terror" is an obviously cheap anthology film featuring three tales and a whole lot of really bad musical interludes. Between the stories (one about possibly the most ineptly run insane asylum ever, where they make ends meet by kidnapping people and selling their dismembered body parts to medical schools; one about a med student who falls for a girl and then falls in with "The Death Club"; and one that features parallel stories about a Holocaust survivor and a cop who discover an immortal agent of Satan and the doctor who is charged by God to carve his heart out) we are reminded about everything that was Bad about the early 1980s pop music and performers on the worst, cheapest traincar set ever built.

The three short tales are all pretty strange, but nonetheless creative and engaging in their own twisted sort of way. The second two feature some pretty bad claymation monsters and even worse gore effects, but in the context of the overall kitchiness of the film, its passable.

4 comments:

  1. this looks like a great cheesy old horror film

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  2. Well... that depends on how you're defining "great." :)

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  3. well lets say it looks like an amusing (in a wierd way) cheesy old horror film!
    Great blog by the way!

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  4. Thanks for the compliment about the blog!

    And if you have a taste for bad movies, this is indeed a fun movie. And if you do watch it, please explain the dancing interludes in the boxcar. :)

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