Night Train to Terror

There are some films so unremittingly, odiously awful, that they actually have their own special charm. I'm not sure Night Train to Terror (1985) is quite in the same league, say, as Plan Nine from Outer Space, at least, insomuch as the latter is a far more popular and well-known cult movie. However, as far as pure cinematic dreck is concerned, Night Train actually outdoes Plan Nine by a considerable margin. Matter of fact, since Night Train was actually edited down from a trio of other films, and then given a ludicrous wraparound segment featuring God and Satan on a train full of 1980s music video jazzercize rejects, one could really argue whether or not the impromptu "anthology flick" qualifies as an actual "movie" at all; at least, in the traditional sense.

It is senseless and plotless. The film begins with the aforementioned 1980s pop music refugees singing the same boring, mediocre tune over and over again, posing prominently with instruments they obviously are not playing. The wardrobe of the skinny, breakdancing third-rung teen heartthrob (Byron Yordan) doing the singing looks as if it were cobbled together from various second-hand clothing bins; he wears a de riguer (for the era) sweatband. The lyrics of the song proclaim "Mama's at the shopping mall, buying new shoes." For a song from the materialistic, financially bloated Eighties, these lyrics seem almost perfect.

Cut to the chase. God (Ferdy Mayne) and Satan (Tony Giorgio, who appeared most famously in The Godfather) sit across from each other with only a window separating them. It seems to be looking out on outer space. They speak some inane dialog about sparring for souls or something, while a tall, cadaverous black conductor comes in and occasionally fills them in on the kids dancing and singing (who seem to never stop). Outer space fades and then we get scenes from an old movie (never completed) starring Richard "The Dungeonmaster" Moll (who use to play Bull on the old TV series "Night Court," and who seems a ubiquitous presence in a lot of 1980s trashcan movies); and a guy that drives his car off a bridge with his new bride in it. We next see a fake-looking moon with fake-looking clouds passing over it, along a fake-looking country road.

The next scene has poor Harry Billings (John Philip Law) being electroshocked in a sanitarium run by a fat man with a British accent, and a skinny, bitchy woman doctor. An orderly named Otto (Richard Moll) runs around menacingly in a black tank top and jeans. Here they have nude women strapped to gurneys, and they off people. Body parts are seen hanging from the wall in a bloody array. NONE of this follows logically; it has the weird, jolting, disjointed quality of a fever dream.

(As does the rest of this damn movie.)

Harry leaves the mental asylum and is next in a bar with an old TV character actor whose name I can never remember (anyone over the age of forty who has watched a Seventies television cop show will, I believe, recognize the face). For some unspecified reason, he pretends to get drunk but pours his shots of liquor out onto the barroom floor. Why? Why? The mind boggles.

The cop show character actor guy goes to the mental home. Here, the fat doctor (played by Arthur M. Braham) and Richard Moll greet him at the door. He is looking for Verna (Lisa Watkins), who is in a padded cell. Moll makes fun of her while the detective or whatever shrugs and walks out, making another appearance. Puzzling.

Dr. Fargo (Sharon Ratcliff) seduces Harry, who is back in the mental home now, and gives him a drug, taking him on a journey to the magic kingdom of MILF. A lot of exposed T and A gets flashed, with Moll molesting various nude women strapped to gurneys, who writhe and scream a lot. There is blood sort of spattered on the walls, a woman swinging from a noose, body parts hacked off and hanging from the ceiling. Moll has a collection of heads in jars.

There is an occasional blast of narration:

"Bodies for money! Bodies for money! The victims were kidnapped, tortured, and finally MURDERED. And then the evil doctors would sell the body parts to medical schools, all around the world.

The female doctor, Fargo, who has previously seduceed Harry, slips the fat English doctor a mickey. She lobotomizes him, but it doesn't turn out well. Harry breaks free of her influence, cold cocks her, and then is chased by Moll. The lobotomized Dr. Brewer and a lobotomized guy in blue scrubs take Dr. Fargo and perform a little impromptu surgery themselves. Moll and John Philip Law tangle, and Law slashes him with a scalpel before decapitating him (which is actually rather cool-looking). More than enough about the "Case of Harry Billings."

The film this was cobbled together from, the unfinished 1981 classic-never to-be, was called Scream Your Head Off!

We go back to Satan and God, with Satan informing us that there is "One hour until the train crash!" The next segment, 'The Case of Gretta Connors," was edited together badly from a 1983 movie called The Death Wish Club (AKA The Dark Side of Love; Carnival of Fools; Gretta), which was about a college frat brother (Rick Barnes) who falls in love with a girl he sees on a stag film ("Gretta", played by the appropriately named "Meredith HAZE"), who becomes transgendered, imagines herself a piano player in a cheap bar, and induces him to join a weird "suicide club," wherein the participants play an elaborate form of Russian Roulette every time they meet. In one segment, featuring a huge, grotesque yet utterly laughable stop-motion poisonous insect, the monster bug flies out the window, where it bites a man necking with his girlfriend on a park bench.

Excuse me while I smoke!

In another segment, the members of the "Death Wish Club" are hooked up to a cheesy low-budget movie electrocution device (with a robot voice), and a guy that looks like Hendrix's ugly little brother (Mark E. Ridley) gets "roasted and toasted", his corpse a hideous, charred, twisted thing. "Excuse me while I smoke!" he says with ironic humor, before getting fried. By this point, Gretta has assumed the role of a young man (we should note: it's not that she is really transsexual in the sense that she has just changed genders. Instead, she actually believes she possesses a whole other male identity or personality); this transition is never explained to the viewer. (In my opinion, she's actually a bigger turn-on with her little pixieish haircut and bow tie than with her long, feminine locks and make-up. But maybe it's just me.)

George Youngmeier (J. Martin Sellers) is a criminal gangster type who first gets Gretta into the pornos. He's jealous of the romance between her and Glen and vows revenge. His goons kidnap Glen and Gretta (who has switched back to her feminine personality) after Glen loses in a fight while trying out some slick kung-fu poses beforehand.

They end up in sleeping bags on the floor of the Death Wish Club, chained up, with a wrecking ball swinging above them. I won't spoil it for the potential viewer by giving away the ending.

On the whole, probably the best segment cobbled together from the best movie.

Which, if you're comparing the relative merits of one turd against another, doesn't mean the sewer reeks any less.

God is Dead!

The third segment stars Richard Moll yet again, as an atheist writer peddling a book called "God is Dead" that has the Bad Religion "No Crosses" logo on the front of it. The wife of this celebrity atheist, Claire (Faith Clift), has demonic dreams of hell opening up in her closet. She nearly gets sucked into the abyss and has to keep hanging onto the door jamb to keep from blowing away.

This story is unaccountably intertwined with the story of an immortal Nazi, who goes through time without aging, and who contemporarily seems to be a socialite disco heartthrob with a David Cassidy haircut and a lounge suit. An old Jewish man, whose dingy apartment room seems to be wallpapered in news clippings and photographs from the Holocaust, recognizes him as a murderous death camp guard. (Note: Such things did occur back several decades ago, but not with men who still looked as if they were in their late twenties.)

He goes across the hall to rouse veteran cop-show actor Cameron Mitchell, who explains, "This all happened in Germany many years ago...we have no jurisdiction." Realizing that the young man in the pictures cannot possibly be the murderous Nazi guard, at one point, Cameron cries out in frustration at the old man, "Goddamn it, It can't be him!"

The Nazi murder scene (taking place at some sort of Nazi feast in Nazi times, where drunken Nazis Siegheil in the same clip repeated weirdly three times) is actually eerily dream-like and effective. The diners seem to be eating their feast in the void, when the murderous immortal Nazi commandant comes in and tells them that the Fuhrer is angry that, "They haven't made their quota this week!" A string quartet of presumably Jewish women in white coats is gunned down. "Quota met!" exults the ageless Nazi devil.

Laughably bad stop-motion animation is cut in at one point, with a spider demon with glowing eyes (all the monsters and demons in this film seem to have such glowing eyes) emerging from a hole to Hell, and killing a man who becomes a stop-motion animated puppet himself before succumbing. This is all so utterly phony and jarring compared with the rest of the film that it looks as if it were cut in from a Rankin and Bass animated adaptation of, say, Dante's Inferno.

A raging holy man (Juan Luis Curiel) who seems to have been borrowed from an old Omen film comes in and exposes himself to Moll, revealing his stylized "666" tattoo. Why he has such a tattoo, we are uncertain, but, there it is.

Nothing else that happens really makes any sense. The crazy priest is killed by the spider-demon stop-motion thing while on what looks to be the ultra fake surface of some alien heavy metal nightmare world; Cameron Mitchell disappears after his Jewish friend is killed by a drippy-faced demon with fangs named "Ishtar" (who is actually rather creepily effective, dressed all in white). Richard Moll is killed by the Nazi Demon guy by being put on a cross (as a stop-motion puppet) amid a volley of sparks.

Claire, whose husband was a famous atheist, is seen praying and lighting candles in a church, and then has a confession with a priest that gives her a holy box. Apparently, she has to cut the heart out of "Olivier" (Satan-Nazi, played by Robert Bristol, whose only other credit seems to be the old UFO movie Hangar 18) and put it in the box to make the evil go away. Okay.

The movie (such as it is), ends with Olivier on an operating table while Claire Haines stabs him and poltergeist stuff goes off in the surgery room. It's pretty gory, with scenes of actual pumping hearts and surgery being spliced in.

The thing ends with a twist. I'm not sure, though, how we even GOT to the ending, what it was all supposed to be about, and so on and so forth.

To quote Heinlein, "And so it goes."

Anyway, the train crashes at dawm killing everyone aboard. Good. At least the neverending 1983 third-rung, grade-Z music video (complete with actual breakdancing at one point) is finally brought to a fiery (albeit fake end). The train, of course, looks like another stop-motion tabletop toy.

This film and the films it was cobbled together from all seem to have been "written" by famed screenwriter Philip Yordan (his son Byron does the singing and breakdancing). Yordan became famous for peddling scripts for the "Hollywood Ten", Hollywood screenwriters (like the equally famous Dalton Trumbo, author of Johnny Got His Gun), blacklisted as communists and subversives during the McCarthy Era.

Yordan actually won an Academy Award not once, but twice, for the screenplays for the movies Detective Story (1951) (it also earned him an Edgar Award), and Broken Lance (1954). He was also nominated for his screenplay for the movie Dillinger (1945). He was no puffball or lightweight.

Making the discerning viewer wonder: What the HELL happened to this guy that he should end up involved with movies like Cataclysm, The Dark Side of Love, and Scream Your Head Off?

The directors of the individual films this is pared-down from, John Carr (The Dark Side of Love), Philip Marshak (Cataclysm), Greg C. Tallas (Cataclysm), and Jay Schlossberg-Cohen (the "Night Train" wraparound), all seem to have been b or z-movie directors, with only Tallas having a credit of actually having worked with Fritz Lang on Testament of Dr. Mabuse. (A Tom McGowan, also credited with having partially directed Cataclysm, directed four episodes of The Magical World of Disney. Perhaps that's why that particular segment has such childish stop-motion animation.)

There are some movies so utterly void of any artistic merit, with continuity errors, laughable special effects, gratuitous gore, mindbogglingly confusing or absent plots, and acting that should be classed a crime, that, to even mention them as "cinema" (in the same sense as say, Citizen Kane), seems to be a surreal leap in logic. It's almost an insult to the art of cinema, an affront to the concept of creative vision. I don't know why the hell Yordan and his partners decided to cobble together Night Train to Terror, as it's a virtual anti-film, much in the manner of Plan Nine or Bloodsucking Freaks. It unspools itself in front of the viewer like a grotesque, pointless dream, one you may have experienced upon falling asleep after a heavy Mexican dinner. Its excessive gore and laughable special effects, as well as the nonexistent storyline, bad acting, dumb dialog, ugly actors, and overall seedy aesthetic (not to mention huge, sleazy T and A shots), render it a relic from the cultural compost heap (perhaps abyss would be a more fitting word).

If it has any value, it's only to look back at an era when such incomprehensible slop was churned out for the burgeoning home video cassette market to turn a quick buck. The result of these "video nasties" was a huge, forgettable glut of soft-core, hard gore, repellent, and puerile "films" aimed at jaded teen thrillseekers and the kinds of folks that like to rubberneck traffic accidents.

I remember, twenty years ago, the first time I saw Night Train to Terror. I couldn't believe that a movie could possibly be so wretchedly bad, so lacking in the basic technical skill of filmmaking, and so utterly without merit. We had had buffalo chicken wings that night; I remember feeling a little queasy. I always associate this movie, now, with a sour stomach.

It is after all a real ...train wreck.

Fin.