Director: Roger Spottiswoode
Writer: T.Y. Drake
Starring: Jaime Lee Curtis
Currently OUT OF PRINT On Video
Body Count: 8
Review: Aside from the obvious Halloween elements, Terror Train is a really fun, fairly inventive and original slasher flick.
The story begins with a college fraternity hazing prank gone wrong. We then fast-forward three years to New Year's Eve, with the same college kids from the first scene now in their senior year. This group of med students boards a train for an all-night party, complete with music, booze, weed, and a magician (played by David Copperfield). They also bring along a killer, and the killer is really brutal (considering this was 1980, before Friday the 13th and Nightmare On Elm Street wrote the book on cinematic brutality). The mystery identity of the killer is not really a mystery, but the film does a good job of keeping you guessing who the killer is disguised as.
Terror Train signaled the end of Jamie Lee Curtis's scream-queen run (she reprised her role as Laurie Strode in Halloween II, but that was only based on the fact that it was a good script and she really like John Carpenter). Nevertheless, she does a good job here, as do all of the actors, by bringing a lot of young adult angst into the story, creating real tension that really works. I think it might have worked a little better if they'd been high school kids, but at this time in the life of the slasher genre, the high school thing was growing stagnant, so college kids were a breath of fresh air...for awhile, anyway.
Go back to the Slasher Singles Page.
Go back to the Home Page.
