Sunday 15 June 2014

Night Train to Terror (1985)






Rather like Frankenstein's Monster, this film is stitched together from the corpses of three other movies.  They've each been pared down to a 20-30 minute short film, then loosely joined together with a framing mechanism based around God and the Devil judging the souls of the characters appearing in each of them.  For some reason, these framing sequences feature an awful lot of extremely eighties music video moments.  Which makes them by far the most entertaining part of the film, outside of the cheesey stop-motion effects that turn up in two of the three segments.

Segment one trots out the old 'illegal organ trading' concept, with a group of evil Doctors kidnapping people, torturing them, and then selling their remains to medical schools.  I'm not sure that would be the most lucrative use of fresh kidneys and hearts.  Most of the victims are attractive young women.  I am sure that this is merely coincidence, as is the frequency with which these young women appear topless.

Segment two deals with a strange club where the members get together to risk their lives in potentially dangerous games of chance.  The justification for why the point of view characters would get involved in such stupidity is extremely flimsy, but the segment again throws around enough nudity that the target audience of teenage boys likely didn't care.

Segment three is a cheap Omen rip-off with the largest preponderance of those delightfully cheesey stop- motion effects I mentioned.  If only the rest of the segment hadn't been so dull I might have even enjoyed it.

This is ultra-cheap film-making, with heaps of recycled footage, shonky acting, bad effects and nonsensical cuts between shots.  I found it endearingly awful, but I suspect most people would only consider the latter of those two words to apply.

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