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Remember the great anthology horror films you’ve always loved? Well, these ain’t them.
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The anthology horror film was always more of an imported thing than a domestic one. After World War II, England’s Ealing Studios reintroduced itself to British moviegoers with DEAD OF NIGHT (1945), a collection of ghost stories helmed by a clutch of in-house directors (Charles Crichton, Alberto Cavaltanci, Robert Hamer, Basil Dearden). It took almost twenty years for the format to catch on; though American International Pictures broke up their run of Edgar Allan Poe adaptations with TALES OF TERROR (1962), the best anthologies were coming from overseas: from Japan (KWAIDAN, 1964), Italy (BLACK SABBATH, 1964) and England — though the revival there was the work of a couple of American expatriates — Max Rosenberg and Milton Subotsky — whose Amicus Productions was responsible for the omnibus horrors of DR. TERROR’S HOUSE OF HORRORS (1965), TORTURE GARDEN (1967), THE HOUSE THAT DRIPPED BLOOD (1971), TALES FROM THE CRYPT (1972), ASYLUM (1972), THE VAULT OF HORROR (1973), and FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE (1973). With horror going big ticket after the success of THE EXORCIST (1973), American anthology horror movies were made for television, with a post-DARK SHADOWS Dan Curtis delivering the chaptered chills of TRILOGY OF TERROR (1975) and DEAD OF NIGHT (1977).
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As susceptible to bust and boom as any market, the anthology business dried up in the late 70s, only to experience a renaissance with the success of the George A. Romero-Stephen King collaboration CREEPSHOW (1982), a collection of five shocking stories in EC Comics mode that spawned no small number of copycat efforts, among them NIGHTMARES (1983), SCREAMTIME (1986), DEADTIME STORIES (1987), FREAKSHOW (1989), and even such big ticket attempts as TWILIGHT ZONE: THE MOVIE (1983) and CAT’S EYE (1985), a Dino De Laurentiis omnibus of shock stories written for the screen by Stephen King. Produced with a painfully obvious lack of wherewithal but boasting the authorial tag of “Academy Award-winner” Philip Yordan, NIGHT TRAIN TO TERROR enjoyed a brief theatrical distribution by Visto International, Inc. in 1985 before being dumped – without fanfare—onto VHS tape. Anyone who took a chance on NIGHT TRAIN TO TERROR as a Prism SP or Parade EP-mode video tape (a staple of sell-through bargain VHS tape bins for years) was rewarded with a head-scratching viewing experience on par with a fever dream fugue.
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Borrowing a trick from DR. TERROR’S HOUSE OF HORRORS (whose manifest of terror tales was bracketed with the framing device of travelers having their fortunes read aboard a speeding night train), NIGHT TRAIN TO TERROR begins on the rails with a metaphysical club car sit-down between God (Ferdy Mayne, from Roman Polanski’s THE FEARLESS VAMPIRE KILLERS) and his fallen angel (Tony Giorgio, often cast as mobsters in such films as THE GODFATHER, MAGNUM FORCE, and CAPONE) as a New Wave band who have come aboard following the breakdown of their tour bus jams in an adjoining carriage.
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With the train doomed to derail, the Lord and Lucifer haggle for the souls of not only the musicians (among them, Philip Yordan’s son Bryon) but three recently deceased individuals whose life stories are replayed through the proscenium of the train window. In “The Case of Harry Billings,” John Phillip Law plays a luckless widower manipulated into supplying victims for the spare body parts black market; in “The Case of Gretta Connors,” a carnival vendor turned porn star (Merideth Haze) pits her producer husband (J. Martin Sellers) against her fratboy lover (Rick Barnes) during visits to an exclusive suicide club; and in “The Case of Claire Hansen,” a surgeon (Faith Clift, Mrs. Phillip Yordan) opposes Satan’s emissary (Robert Bristol) on earth with a peripheral assist from a city detective (Cameron Mitchell) and a Holocaust survivor (Marc Lawrence).
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All of which sounds great on paper. As NIGHT TRAIN TO TERROR unfolds, however, things simply do not add up, line up, or match up. Plot lines are muddied into incomprehensibility, ostensible principal characters fade into the periphery while secondary and tertiary characters take focus, shots fail to match or even to cut together in anything like a proper narrative structure, and all the while that damned New Wave band keeps performing their one song ad nauseam while stop-motion monsters pop up at intervals to tear characters apart or drag them into Hell. Toeing the fine line between audacious and stupid, NIGHT TRAIN TO TERROR turns out to have been constructed from three then-unfinished low budget features: CATACLYSM, a mid-70s disaster flick retooled post-THE OMEN (1976) as a Satanic potboiler (and subsequently released as a standalone feature titled THE NIGHTMARE NEVER ENDS); GRETA (1983), aka THE DEATH WISH CLUB, in which the “Death Wish Club” angle is greatly reduced in significance; and HARRY (1982), which despite never having been completed was later issued on VHS tape by Scimitar as SCREAM YOUR HEAD OFF, amounting to little more than a loosely connected jumble of setpieces and editing suite trimmings in search of a tangible plot.
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Tying all of these disparate elements together is Philip Yordan (1914-2013), a law school dropout who came to Hollywood during the Depression to work as a screenwriter for Monogram Pictures. Yordan’s abiding claim to fame is for taking sole credit for work he either assigned to other writers (among them, William Castle) or as a well-paid “front” for such blacklisted scribes as Ben Maddow and Bernard Gordon. (Yordan’s only Oscar win was for a movie he never worked on, BROKEN LANCE, a 1954 western remake of Yordan and Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s earlier HOUSE OF STRANGERS [1949]; Mankiewicz rewrote Yordan’s original story for HOUSE OF STRANGERS but when forced by arbitration to share screenplay credit with Yordan had his name removed from the finished film – thus, when the story materials were dusted off for BROKEN LANCE, Yordan was the only writer credited and sole recipient of the award for Best Original Story.) After a tenure in Spain with producer Samuel Bronston, Yordan relocated to Utah, where he wrote ultra-low budget films about Bigfoot and the Mormon church in conjunction with local theatre and film professionals, many of whom pop up in the cast and crew of NIGHT TRAIN TO TERROR – among them Charles Moll, later Richard Moll, the chrome-domed Bull Shannon of NBC’s long-running sitcom NIGHT COURT.
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The presence of such once-promising talents as Cameron Mitchell (who seems to have been paid for his appearance in cigarettes), John Phillip Law (still as fit as he was in his DANGER: DIABOLIK/BARBARELLA days nearly twenty years earlier), and pockmarked Marc Lawrence (a reliable Hollywood ethnic heavy, and costar of the ostensibly Yordan-scripted DILLINGER) in two roles (in the same story!) adds an unexpected layer of poignancy to the Psychotronic slumgullion that is NIGHT TRAIN TO TERROR; these actors all deserved better, and at least Lawrence enjoyed fleeting rediscovery by Quentin Tarantino and small roles in FOUR ROOMS (1995) and FROM DUSK TO DAWN (1996) – as well as in Jim McBride’s THE BIG EASY (1987) and Lasse Hallström’s THE SHIPPING NEWS (2001) – but it would be a lie to say the movie is not goofily entertaining. Laced throughout its running time with unabashed female frontal nudity and just crazy enough to work, the film is an undeniable midnight cult charmer that – like Ed Wood’s PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE (1959) or Claudio Fragasso’s TROLL 2 – will either make the party or kill it cold.
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Batting clean-up in the overnight slot is the aforementioned CAT’S EYE (1985), scripted by Stephen King but mucked up in post. The Bangor-Maine-based horror writer was not yet big business when Brian DePalma adapted his first novel, Carrie, as a 1976 feature film. A decade later and King had nearly as many movies in circulation bearing his name as books in print. When producer Dino De Laurentiis put CAT’S EYE into play, the past two years had yielded Lewis Teague’s CUJO (1983), David Cronenberg’s THE DEAD ZONE (1983), John Carpenter’s CHRISTINE (1983), and Mark L. Lester’s FIRESTARTER (1984) — all based on King novels – as well as CREEPSHOW and Fritz Kierschs’ CHILDREN OF THE CORN (1984), culled from King’s 1978 collection Night Shift. Having acquired the rights to Night Shift, De Laurentiis hired King to adapt two more tales from the collection – “Quitters, Inc.” and “The Ledge” – and to craft an original third tale, “The General” and tie the triptych together with a wraparound story of the ghost of a dead child and her faithful pet cat. Produced as a vehicle for Drew Barrymore in foll0w-up to FIRESTARTER, CAT’S EYE finds King in a playful, self-referential mood, going for belly laughs as often as goosebumps. Prior to its release in April 1985, the anthology’s grim opener (“A Death in the Family,” featuring Broadway star Patti Lupone as Barrymore’s grieving mother) was cut by fiat of distributor MGM-UA as too downbeat for a PG-13 rating. Though the film received support from the major critics (among them Vincent Canby and Roger Ebert), CAT’S EYE was the least profitable Stephen King adaptation to date, earning back not quite double its initial investment of $7 million.