Night Train to Terror review

In honor of the news of the Vinegar Syndrome Night Train to Terror blu ray release!  From the crusty crypt archive, an old review.....

NIGHT TRAIN TO TERROR

Night Train to Terror is loaded to the gills with exploitation, lobotomy, demonic Nazis, death traps, mayhem, monsters, murder; it’s even got musical breaks with an 80’s pop band in pastel sweat pants singing about how everyone has something to do but you (no shit, that’s why I’m watching this movie!). God and Satan discuss the cosmic underpinnings of the universe in a train cart as people’s faces melt from electrical shock. 

 

It’s like the gods of Velveeta took an atomic dump on a train and sent it trucking to a distant galaxy of other worldly B-grade goodness. The train came back and this is what we got. I’m in B-movie trash heaven.

Night Train to Terror holds a special place in my decrepit, gore-gasming heart next to such cinematic calamities as Hollywood Meat Cleaver Massacre. Both movies seem too utterly ridiculous to exist in this dimension of reality. Watching them is almost like peeking into an exotic alien mind; not everything makes sense but I find the oddity strangely intoxicating.

The plot is essentially there is a train, going somewhere, Satan says it will crash, God doesn’t want it to, they watch cliff notes to other films (the only one I recognized was Evil Never Dies). Bull from Night Court seems to be the only connection from one story to the other, filling in different roles for each story. In another car on the train there is a band playing the same song over and over. This is the place we go for a musical break after God and Satan decide the fates of everyone in the stories we watch. The stories are pretty neat, sufficiently dosed with guts and gruel, but seem to jump around a lot and don’t always make sense, much like the trans-dimensional alien brain. I thought the story about the death club was the best, but even that was more confusing than Chinese checkers. At the end the train lifts off the tracks, the cheesy band continues to play the one song they know, and the train travels off into the distant cosmos.

I can only wish that it returns to this world once again.