[THE ARCHIVE] Life gets thrown off-track in ‘Terror Train’

Friendship is a one-way track, but revenge can take life off the rails.

Terror Train (1980) is director Roger Spottiswoode's tale of overdue revenge on college students on the cusp of adulthood. It’s salacious, macabre, and a reminder that an auspicious life can be derailed by selfishness.

Alana Maxwell is a college senior celebrating the new year with her boyfriend Mo and their medical student friends. They all pile onto an old train in their costumes for the last party of the school year; a rager with alcohol, dope, and pranks until a ravenous stowaway spikes the fun with blood-soaked revenge.

Alana is an academically focused student who would rather work to afford college than hang out with her friends. She is a hard worker but still a people pleaser by nature, and thus is surrounded by the present she created by maintaining her toxic relationships while going along with their antics. This is why she goes along with a senior prank that sent a student to an asylum. It’s easy to go along when she’s not the butt of the joke. That night stayed with her, but she still can’t leave the friend group that caused it. 

She finds herself alone once everyone that was involved in that prank starts to die. Gone are the hangouts, engagements, and scholarships. All she has left is the guilt for the past. Everything she built and maintained was ruined by her inactivity and reluctance. It’s a somber glimpse into how years of hard work can be unraveled by a moment of carelessness.

This is a hidden gem that can be easily cast off as a Halloween knockoff. It’s fueled by deception: friends, enemies, and lovers pull the rug out from under each other at any chance. It’s the worst people imaginable stuck on a train.

Executive producer Daniel Grodnik's whole idea for the movie was, “like Halloween on a train.” He approached his friends John Carpenter and Debra Hill with his idea, which they gave their blessing to. Jamie Lee Curtis didn’t see the idea as too derivative, and she liked the setting being a train.

I loved the characters' interactions and the illusive nature of the story. The medical students are warped and depraved. They are so unfazed by corpses that they’ve incorporated them into their gags. They have no boundaries towards the dead or the living. They cheat on their partners and actively try to ruin each other's relationships. It makes the kills warranted with little sympathy for the victims. 

The tricks being pulled on the characters and audience are nerve-wrecking. People disappear, then reappear only to be the killer in a different costume. Clues that point to the killer getting misread, then the wrong person is blamed. The twist ending is impressive, and I didn’t see it coming. It’s a magic act being done and anyone who doesn’t know the trick is getting a curtain call.
The problems for me start with the opening being a mess. The camera doesn’t seem to notice who to focus on. It is pointed at people or framed in a way that it’s hard to tell who is talking. This is a problem I only noticed during the introduction to the characters at the bonfire. It was jarring, but understandable for a first time director. The ending is abrupt as the killer is thrown off the train into a snowy river as the train rides on, then its credits. It doesn’t feel intentional, almost as if they ran out of money or time. It makes for an unsatisfying end to Alana’s battle, but in a way, it symbolizes that the only way to solve our guilt is to move on.

This movie is a spiteful, guilty, throwback. It’s filled with characters you can’t wait to see get their comeuppance and gave me another reason to not go to college parties anymore. If you love killers with constant costume changes, check out Terror Train (1980) on Tubi.

Six severed fingers out of ten.