A midnight train going anywhere
I can hear you right now. You're asking, "They made a remake of Terror Train?" That is, if you even remember the movie Terror Train existed in the first place. It's a minor 1980 classic notable for its setting (a train), its holiday theme (New Year's Eve), its star (Jamie Lee Curtis), and a couple notables in minor roles (David Copperfield and, randomly, Ben Johnson). But here's the thing. Tubi's new streaming exclusive remake is technically the second remake of Terror Train. Or at least the one-and-a-halfth. The 2008 Thora Birch film Train was conceived as a remake, but the script moved so far away from the source that they didn't even bill it as such. No such troubles with the 2022 version, because this is a copy-and-paste job the likes of which have not been seen in many a year. Or at the very least, since 2006 when the Julia Stiles The Omen hewed so closely to the 1976 Omen that they had to credit the original screenwriter.
Terror Train 2022 is remarkably committed to porting over the character names, dynamics, and plot points (all the way down to the order and manner of the deaths), with only the lightest sheen of modernization gussying up the dialogue until the final 15 minutes, which are somewhat substantially changed (and much more stupid). So we have Alana (Robyn Alomar), a young sorority girl who is dragged into a prank where frat pledge Kenny (Noah Parker) is told he's going to hook up with her, but finds a desiccated corpse stolen from the med school in his bed. This drives him to the brink of madness and he is carted away in an ambulance, never to return to school.
Three years later, it is Halloween night (the film's first substantial change from the original, and one that actually works - better justifying the fact that it's a costume party) and the same frat and sorority kids are loading up on a party train to have the time of their lives (another new dropped line indicates that this train is going in a loop rather than just venturing straight out into the Yukon, which is what one presumes the train in the original is doing). When an unknown assailant murders the class clown and steals his costume, they begin to stalk the train, taking on the costumes of various victims and slowly hunting down the people involved in the horrible prank, which includes the horrible asshole Doc (Matias Garrido), his girlfriend and Alana's best friend Mitchy (Emma Elle Paterson), his best friend and Alana's boyfriend Mo (Corteon Moore) and a mysterious magician (Schitt's Creek's Tim Rozon).
The only other notable differences between the original and the remake are as follows: The train conductor character Carne is now played by a woman (Canadian comedian Mary Walsh). One notable character (the magician's assistant) is removed, to the detriment of the film, and one notable character (the train Porter Sadie, played by Nadine Bhabha) is added, impacting literally no part of the plot although she does run around a whole bunch acting like she's totally thinking about becoming important soon.
So what we have here is a formal experiment the likes of which have never been attempted. Terror Train 1980 is well-known but not particularly beloved, featuring bloodless deaths and a largely anonymous cast. What would happen, then, if we took that film and removed Jamie Lee Curtis as the Final Girl? Readers, nothing good, let me tell you that much.
It's not that Robyn Alomar is giving a bad Final Girl performance. Far from it, in fact, as she's the third-best performer in the cast (behind Walsh, who is having fun hamming it up as a gruff working woman, and Rozon, who is at least attempting to give the magician a depth and consitency of character that was not present in Copperfield's extremely off-putting performance). But there is no discounting the magic that Curtis could bring to even the most banal stock characters in an early '80s horror film.
Alana is a supremely boring character, and we care about her because Curtis is there to give her a soul that you don't want to see snuffed out. Alomar is talented at making her character feel afraid and vulnerable, but she is playing the Alana that is on the page: an insipid nobody, around whom this new screenplay attempts and fails to jerry-rig a theme about the consequences of hanging out with bad people.
It's hard to say that Terror Train is exactly bad, since it's going through the same motions as a film that is totally decent. Plus, it even amps up the gore. Just a tiny bit (with the exception of two kills that are actually pretty neat), but that's enough to differentiate it from the original, the largest problem of which is that it's so goddamn anemic in its murder sequences. But it has hampered itself by only allowing one to discuss it in comparison with the 1980 film. This may shock you, but the slick, polished texture of a 2020s made-for-Tubi digital film is nothing compared to what a slasher from the early 1980s looks, talks, sounds, and feels like, and that leaves Terror Train 2022 at an incalculable disadvantage.
Plus, I cannot overstate how underbaked this film's new finale is. I suppose I get why screenwriters in 2022 would feel the need to change the original reveal, even though it seems largely like a misunderstanding of why people object to certain dated twist endings to which that one is tangentially related. Everything that is related to this one major change, however, is purest nonsense and forces the movie to tack on a distended extra finale that is pointless and frustrating.
At the end of the day, Terror Train 2022 isn't exactly a miserable film to sit through, so that's something. However, I cannot think of a single reason why any human being outside of the most obsessive slasher completist should ever sit down and watch it.
Brennan Klein is a millennial who knows way more about 80's slasher movies than he has any right to. He's a former host of the Attack of the Queerwolf podcast and a current senior movie/TV news writer at Screen Rant. You can find his other reviews on his blog Popcorn Culture. Follow him on Twitter or Letterboxd, if you feel like it.
Terror Train 2022 is remarkably committed to porting over the character names, dynamics, and plot points (all the way down to the order and manner of the deaths), with only the lightest sheen of modernization gussying up the dialogue until the final 15 minutes, which are somewhat substantially changed (and much more stupid). So we have Alana (Robyn Alomar), a young sorority girl who is dragged into a prank where frat pledge Kenny (Noah Parker) is told he's going to hook up with her, but finds a desiccated corpse stolen from the med school in his bed. This drives him to the brink of madness and he is carted away in an ambulance, never to return to school.
Three years later, it is Halloween night (the film's first substantial change from the original, and one that actually works - better justifying the fact that it's a costume party) and the same frat and sorority kids are loading up on a party train to have the time of their lives (another new dropped line indicates that this train is going in a loop rather than just venturing straight out into the Yukon, which is what one presumes the train in the original is doing). When an unknown assailant murders the class clown and steals his costume, they begin to stalk the train, taking on the costumes of various victims and slowly hunting down the people involved in the horrible prank, which includes the horrible asshole Doc (Matias Garrido), his girlfriend and Alana's best friend Mitchy (Emma Elle Paterson), his best friend and Alana's boyfriend Mo (Corteon Moore) and a mysterious magician (Schitt's Creek's Tim Rozon).
The only other notable differences between the original and the remake are as follows: The train conductor character Carne is now played by a woman (Canadian comedian Mary Walsh). One notable character (the magician's assistant) is removed, to the detriment of the film, and one notable character (the train Porter Sadie, played by Nadine Bhabha) is added, impacting literally no part of the plot although she does run around a whole bunch acting like she's totally thinking about becoming important soon.
So what we have here is a formal experiment the likes of which have never been attempted. Terror Train 1980 is well-known but not particularly beloved, featuring bloodless deaths and a largely anonymous cast. What would happen, then, if we took that film and removed Jamie Lee Curtis as the Final Girl? Readers, nothing good, let me tell you that much.
It's not that Robyn Alomar is giving a bad Final Girl performance. Far from it, in fact, as she's the third-best performer in the cast (behind Walsh, who is having fun hamming it up as a gruff working woman, and Rozon, who is at least attempting to give the magician a depth and consitency of character that was not present in Copperfield's extremely off-putting performance). But there is no discounting the magic that Curtis could bring to even the most banal stock characters in an early '80s horror film.
Alana is a supremely boring character, and we care about her because Curtis is there to give her a soul that you don't want to see snuffed out. Alomar is talented at making her character feel afraid and vulnerable, but she is playing the Alana that is on the page: an insipid nobody, around whom this new screenplay attempts and fails to jerry-rig a theme about the consequences of hanging out with bad people.
It's hard to say that Terror Train is exactly bad, since it's going through the same motions as a film that is totally decent. Plus, it even amps up the gore. Just a tiny bit (with the exception of two kills that are actually pretty neat), but that's enough to differentiate it from the original, the largest problem of which is that it's so goddamn anemic in its murder sequences. But it has hampered itself by only allowing one to discuss it in comparison with the 1980 film. This may shock you, but the slick, polished texture of a 2020s made-for-Tubi digital film is nothing compared to what a slasher from the early 1980s looks, talks, sounds, and feels like, and that leaves Terror Train 2022 at an incalculable disadvantage.
Plus, I cannot overstate how underbaked this film's new finale is. I suppose I get why screenwriters in 2022 would feel the need to change the original reveal, even though it seems largely like a misunderstanding of why people object to certain dated twist endings to which that one is tangentially related. Everything that is related to this one major change, however, is purest nonsense and forces the movie to tack on a distended extra finale that is pointless and frustrating.
At the end of the day, Terror Train 2022 isn't exactly a miserable film to sit through, so that's something. However, I cannot think of a single reason why any human being outside of the most obsessive slasher completist should ever sit down and watch it.
Brennan Klein is a millennial who knows way more about 80's slasher movies than he has any right to. He's a former host of the Attack of the Queerwolf podcast and a current senior movie/TV news writer at Screen Rant. You can find his other reviews on his blog Popcorn Culture. Follow him on Twitter or Letterboxd, if you feel like it.
Categories: horror, needless remakes, slashers
