Terror Train (1980)
Starring: Jamie Lee Curtis, Ben Johnson, David Copperfield
Director: Roger Spottiswood
Synopsis: 80's slasher film starring Scream Queen Jamie Lee Curtis
Reviewed by: Omar Khan

"Stylish, scary fun." — Kevin Thomas, Los Angeles Times

"Sleek and eerie." — Richard Corliss, Time

"Competent." — Variety

"A respectable... exploitation movie." — Bill Kelley, Fort Lauderdale News

"Magic is well engineered." — Jacqi Tully, Arizona Daily Star

"Stylish photography and the novelty of the killer donning the costume of each successive victim lift this slightly above most in this disreputable genre." — Leonard Maltin's Movie Guide

"The thrill of a picture like Terror Train is the shrewd manner in which it plays against audience expectations." — John Kenneth Muir, Horror Films of the 1980s

"Not as acclaimed as other slasher films starring Jamie Lee Curtis... but a personal favourite." — Bloody Disgusting

"They're a series of sensations, strung together on a plot. Any plot will do." — Roger Ebert

"A run-of-the-mill slasher film whose central gimmick is setting its action on a train." — Nick Schager, Lessons of Darkness

"better than most of its kind", Time Out

"muddled" Creature Features

"stylish" Maltin's

The post-Halloween slasher boom was now gathering unstoppable momentum. Studios had discovered the perfect formula: modest budgets, attractive young casts and healthy profits. Following the enormous success of films such as Friday the 13th and Prom Night, virtually every producer in Hollywood wanted a slice of the action.

The formula quickly became almost ritualistic. A cruel prank played upon a social outcast goes disastrously wrong, only for the surviving perpetrators to begin dropping like flies several years later at the hands of a mysterious masked killer. It was a template that was recycled endlessly throughout the early eighties as studios rushed to cash in on the craze.

Initially, many of the major studios had regarded such films as beneath their dignity, but the box-office success of Friday the 13th soon swept away any lingering scruples. Horror was suddenly big business.

Terror Train opened on Friday, 3 October 1980, just in time for the Halloween season, and its release coincided with my very first visit to the United States. I found myself buying a ticket for the 9:30 a.m. screening at New York's Embassy 5 Cinema in Times Square. The most frightening aspect of the experience turned out not to be the film itself but the fact that I was the sole member of the audience in a cinema seating around five hundred people.

Only hours earlier, I had watched Motel Hell in the very same theatre to a healthy crowd, but Times Square at half past nine on a weekday morning was another world entirely. Garbage trucks rumbled through the streets, exhausted revellers staggered home after a night of excess, prostitutes and hustlers disappeared into side streets, while bleary-eyed patrons emerged squinting into the daylight after all-night marathons of kung fu, splatter, zombies, cannibals and exploitation films at the legendary 42nd Street grindhouses. It was a raw, chaotic and utterly unforgettable Times Square—very different from the sanitised tourist destination it has since become.

The film itself follows the familiar slasher blueprint. A group of college students play a cruel practical joke on an awkward outsider, with tragic consequences. Three years later, they reunite aboard a train for a New Year's Eve costume party, blissfully convinced that the past has long been forgotten.

"It was only a joke that got out of hand," one of them remarks.

Unfortunately, somebody remembers.

The masquerade setting proves an inspired idea, allowing the killer to move unnoticed among the revellers while constantly changing disguises. The memorable Groucho Marx costume remains the film's visual trademark, while future superstar David Copperfield appears throughout, providing elaborate magic performances that surprisingly become an integral part of the proceedings.

Terror Train is undeniably another Halloween imitator, but it is a reasonably competent one. Director Roger Spottiswoode keeps the killer's identity concealed effectively until the closing scenes and makes good use of the confined railway carriages to generate a welcome sense of claustrophobia.

Jamie Lee Curtis, already establishing herself as horror's reigning scream queen, lends a degree of class and credibility to material that might otherwise have slipped into routine B-movie territory.

Even so, the film never quite catches fire. The pacing is sluggish, genuine suspense remains in short supply and long stretches drift by without generating much excitement. Despite the novel railway setting, Terror Train ultimately proves little more than another by-the-numbers slasher assembled from familiar ingredients.

Still, it remains essential viewing for anyone interested in the great slasher boom of the late 1970s and early 1980s. It may never reach the heights of Halloween, Friday the 13th or Prom Night, but it serves as a perfectly respectable specimen of a genre that briefly dominated horror cinema.

Ironically, being alone in that vast Times Square cinema proved considerably more unsettling than anything the masked killer managed to deliver on screen.

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