Night Train to Terror

So Byron Yordan says to his uncle Philip one day "uncle Philip, me and some friends would like to do an MTV video but we have no talent and no idea, how can we make an MTV video uncle Philip?" Or groveling to that effect. To which Oscar winning script writer uncle Philip Yordan replies "why I know just the antidote to cure your ails, we'll grab three movies on which I recently worked ("Cataclysm", "Death Wish Club" and "Scream Your Head Off" which we never finished) and get old mate John Carr to graft them together like an elephant trunk onto a mouse. Then we'll edit you and your friends into the story as musicians travelling aboard the "Night Train To Terror".

And now you're up to date. Tony Giorgio and Ferdy Mayne play Satan and God respectively riding aboard the night train, on which said rock band mince about in Flashdance garb singing their signature tune ("Everybody's Got Something to Do, Everybody But You") while Giorgio and Mayne review a series of vignettes debating whether the characters should be acquitted to heaven or hell for their deeds. Essentially previews the three aforementioned movies, conjoining them for the absolute mothership of all horror anthologies. Lashings of sadism, nudity, an abattoir-sized load of body parts (no exaggeration) and nonsensical editing that you absolutely have to see before you depart this mortal coil.

John Philip Law is the mind programmed maniac who lures women to an asylum where Richard Moll lies in wait, hacksaw at the ready in the unfinished "Scream Your Head Off" while in "Death Wish Club" a misguided porn star is born and then inducted along with her smitten boyfriend into death defying games that test the mettle of brave participants - this one is pretty surreal with head-crushing, brain-frying gore galore. The final vignette is extracted from "The Omen" inspired "Cataclysm" starring Cameron Mitchell, Marc Lawrence and Faith Clift as God's desperate rearguard against Satan and his claymation army. It's well photographed but comes off the worst of the trio due to the clumsy truncation. Overall this anthology's construction is as ghastly as the special effects it previews and needs to be witnessed to be fully appreciated.

Night Train To Terror is a genuine modern classic. It's a three-part horror anthology edited from three movies, two of which were released separately (Cataclysm and The Death Wish Club) and the third of which was never properly finished. It doesn't make any damn sense, although Richard Moll appears in two segments complete with hair.

The stories are hosted by God (played by "Himself," really Ferdy Mayne) and Mr. Satan (played by "Lu Cipher," ha ha indeed) who sit on a train where a terrible breakdancing '80s band plays the same song over and over again. Highlights include, well pretty much everything. The first segment (the unfinished one) is the most extreme, featuring lots of sadistic violence and gratuitous nudity. The second, The Death Wish Club, is the weakest, although it's still basically a series of cheesy, fun death scenes. The third segment, Cataclysm, has been punched up with new footage of badly-animated stop motion monsters throwing dolls of the characters around.

Not one of the three stories is coherent, but the whole thing is immensely entertaining for fans of strange bad movies. Sit down with some friends and some kind of intoxicating substance (by which I obviously mean beer or other alcohol, I wouldn't advise anyone to take anything illegal, no sir) and you'll have a whale of a time with this one.

My review was written in May 1985 after a Times Square screening.

"Night Train to Terror" is a hodge-podge of at least three separate horror films, crudely edited together as an omnibus picture.

Wraparound footage has God (Ferdy Mayne sporting an arresting white beard) and the Devil (Lu Sickler) quarreling on a train over which human souls they will get, giving rise to three case histories. (An inept rock group is also on the train with its souls up for grabs, and irritating musical numbers interrupt the action at random.)

First two cases were filmed circa 1982 by director John Carr and play like excerpts from unfinished features, both presented here with the entire story carried by voiceover narration. John Phillip Law toplines in "Harry", sent to a sanitarium after his car crashes, where mad doctors and a crazed orderly (Charles Moll, of tv's "Night Court" series) use him to pick up pretty girls who are then killed, their organs sold to medical schools. Segment includes lots of nudity, gore and many shots filmed out-of-focus. Next, Meridith Haze portrays "Gretta", an aspiring pianist, duped into joining The Death Club, where jaded folks play fatal, sadistic games.

Finale, apparently shot in 1979 as a feature title "Cataclysm" (which received an R rating in 1981 from the MPAA on its own), is a religious tract in which veteran screenwriter Philip Yordan gets on a soapbox. James Hansen (Charles Moll, again) is a Nobel prize winner who has written a book "God Is Dead" and goes on tv preaching his anti-religion party line. He gets his comeuppance from an ageless Nazi named Olivier who in fact is the devil's emissary. Cameron Mitchell appears as a cop hunting Olivier.

Mishmash features stock footage, including widescreen shots hilariously "squeezed" in an attempt to match the other scenes, plus several stop motion animation monsters that comically battle tiny puppet versions of the cast members.

Night Train to Terror (1985)

* 1/2 (out of 4)

God and Satan are on board a train where a rock band is playing. The two talk about who is respected more and then we see three separate stories. The first story deals with a man who feels guilty over a drunk driving death that he caused. He finds himself involved in a strange experiment. The second story deals with a medical student who falls in love with a beautiful woman and gets drawn into a strange world of monsters. The final story has a detective (Cameron Mitchell) investigating a murder that leads to a Satanic playboy with special powers.

NIGHT TRAIN TO TERROR is a really, really bizarre little movie with an even more bizarre behind-the-scenes story. The only new footage here are the scenes dealing with the rock band and God and Satan. Everything else is footage taken from three completely different movies. What's so strange is that all three of those movies are available to view in their complete form so it's kind of pointless watching them chopped up to fit 20-30 minute segments.

The biggest problem with this movie is that all three stories are completely confusing and they never make too much sense. THere are so many logical issues with each of the three stories and it's easy to see why because all of them are missing over a hours worth of footage. To say that this film was a complete hack job would be fair and it's also fair to say that the studio was just trying to make some cash out of the previous films that I'm guessing they already owed. Why not cut them down, add a wrap-around story and try to pass it off as something new?

Whatever their reasons were, it's funny to think that NIGHT TRAIN TO TERROR has remained easy to find over the years while the three other complete films (MARILYN ALIVE AND BEHIND BARS, THE DARK SIDE TO LOVE and CATACLYSM) aren't as easy to track down, although THE DARK SIDE OF LOVE was released as a bonus feature for the Blu-ray release of NIGHT TRAIN TO TERROR.

As it stands, this is a pretty hard film to judge simply because of the editing process. The end result is quite poor and it's hard to be entertained by NIGHT TRAIN TO TERROR simply because the stories are so bad as they are presented here. To really judge them you'd need to see the complete films. As it stands, NIGHT TRAIN TO TERROR is pretty bad but the backstory is much more interesting.

Night Train to Terror is a crazy mess of a movie. The framing story for this anthology involves God and Satan sitting on a train together discussing various cases, each of which form the different segments of the movie. As far as set ups for these kind of anthologies go it's not too bad a premise. Needless to say it is done in an at times jaw-droppingly cheesy manner. It wasn't long into it that I began to suspect the truth about the nature of this anthology. Namely, that the makers had grabbed a bunch of old movies and edited them down to 20-30 minutes and used them as segments of this anthology. The wraparound material is as cheesy as all hell and the three movies, each wacky, sleazy or goofy in their own right become concentrated slices of nonsensical shlock in their truncated forms. There seems to be no logic to their inclusion in the anthology in their current states. The three movies from which they are apparently culled- Scream Your Head Off, Death Wish Club and Shivers (Aka. Cataclysm, Satan's Supper or The Nightmare Never Ends) are connected by writer Philip Yordan, who scripted all three, although Director John Carr was responsible also for the first two segments. Presumably they needed to make a quick buck of their own material (The movie from which the first segment was taken apparently never got a proper release other than a bootleg copy years after) and quickly put together the wraparound material. As it is none of the movies seems particularly well suited to being truncated in the form they are, with far too much going on. As such, none of the segments makes too much sense even with the clumsy narration to smooth over the plot holes and each is dementedly paced and edited. They don't even fit very well with the wraparound material. The supposedly main characters whose deeds are meant to be judged by God and Satan have increasingly little to do in each segment, with more time spent on the other characters in each story. The makers did make sure it seems to include all the gore, violence, sleaze and wacky SFX shots that they could from each movie though in favour of having a movie with any coherence.

In the first segment, the case of Harry Billings, the pacing of the story makes it seem more like an extended trailer than an actual movie. The plot, which is far too much for a short anthology segments whizzes through at a demented, frenetic pace and most scenes don't last for more than about thirty seconds to a minute. There are numerous and repetitive sequences of Harry picking and drugging women, them being strapped down and chopped up at the clinic which last for about 40 seconds each. There are also a whole bunch of subplots that hurdled through at breakneck speed. As it is the movie these parts are taken from seems to be a dodgy exploitive piece mostly centering around the death and dismemberment of young woman.

The second segment, the case of Gretta Connors is probably even goofier involving a young man who falls in love with a porn star getting forced into joining 'death-wish club',a group of decadent types who like to put themselves in outlandish dangerous situations involving elaborate death traps and killer insects. Effectively elaborate games of Russian roulette, whch they get a kick out of. This segment is even more disjointed than the last with even more of the plot being explained by the narrator, who in fact talks over characters at various points in the story. It is probably the most interesting of the segments with the elaborate death traps and the wacky premise.

The third and final segment is the case of Claire Hansen. It was watching this segment it was confirmed for me that Night Train to Terror was using condensed versions of existing shlock films as I had actually seen the full version of the film in question before. The plot is too messy and sprawling, with too many threads to go into much detail. I seem to recall that was the case with the full-length version and it is even more choppy and all over the place in its truncated form. Even in its shortened form this last segment drags a bit, despite the wacky nature of the story but there are some good aspects such as the the demonic villain Olivier, the Claymation demons and the over the top finale which involves a bloody open heart surgery.

For some reason the discussions of God and Satan are inter-cut with music clips from a very eighties pop group who are performing in another part of the train. Apparently the train is going to crash at dawn and God and Satan are discussing who will get the souls of the performers when it happens- the segments they watch in-between are apparently just a way for them to kill time. The music clips are incredibly cheesy and involves all that you would expect from bad eighties pop- big hair, leg warmers, halter tops, synthesisers, shoulder pads, mullets, headbands, gratuitous break-dancing and deeply cheesy and nonsensical lyrics.

On the whole, a weird little curiosity.