NIGHT TRAIN TO TERROR (1985)

FILM: A GORE MOVIE THAT'S JUST AS BAD AS THE SUM OF ITS PARTS

Philadelphia Inquirer, The (PA) - June 18, 1985

Author: Rick Lyman, Inquirer Movie Critic

Even in the grimy world of gore movies, a genre that earns its keep by poking needles in its audience, Night Train to Terror casts an ugly pall.

Not that it's extraordinarily nauseating - there's your run-of-the-mill collection of decapitations, slit throats and bloated corpses. But the movie is so awful, so patently boring, that you wonder if people who see it will ever go to the movies again.

Night Train takes place aboard a metaphysical choo-choo to perdition where, in the club car, God and Satan are having a debate. "Every creature on Earth is meaningful to me," God says. "After all, I made them." Satan just sneers.

As they bicker, the train window becomes a TV monitor upon which we watch the subjects of their debate.

This is as crummy as it sounds. But it's poetry - poetry - compared to the trilogy of good-vs.-evil vignettes that are played out on the movie screen.

What Jay Schlossberg-Cohen, who lists himself as director, apparently did was to take three cheapo horror movies and butcher them into 20-minute Twilight Zone-ish segments. The God-vs.-Satan stuff is the phony thread that ties them together.

John Phillip Law plays a hypnotized hunk used by the unscrupulous owners of a sanitarium to attract gorgeous women who are dismembered and sold to some medical junkyard. What, no call for male body parts? Market glutted?

In the second segment, a college boy tries to save a porno queen from the clutches of her evil pimp, only to find himself prisoner of the dreaded Death Club.

In the third segment, Cameron Mitchell plays a police detective who tries to uncover the secrets of a satanic rich boy who may or may not be a Nazi war
criminal.

Clearly, each of these segments was at one time a full-length motion picture. Not that you'd ever want to actually see it.

But what could be more boring than three lousy gore movies hacked into incomprehensible, 20-minute vignettes?

NIGHT TRAIN TO TERROR

Produced and directed by Jay Schlossberg-Cohen, written by Phillip Yordan, music by Ralph Ives and distributed by Visto International; running time, 1 hour, 33 mins. *

Harry - John Phillip Law

Lieutenant - Cameron Mitchell

Greg - Mark Lawrence

Satan - Charles Moll

Parents' guide: R (violence, nudity, profanity)