Terror Train

Four years ago a group of six frat brothers and sorority sisters from Sigma Phi played a practical joke on a pledge. To everyone except the freshman victim, who was driven over the edge by the prank, and Alana, the participant who now regrets what she did, the incident was soon forgotten.

But now, with the about-to-graduate seniors of Sigma Phi boarding a private train for a cross-country New Year's eve party – complete with masks – it is payback time…

The directorial debut of Roger Spottiswoode – everybody has to start somewhere, though in the Canadian's case this was actually as an editor with Peckinpah among others – Terror Train is a formulaic post-Halloween slasher film that pretty much goes through a complete checklist of generic requirements: past traumatic event; significant date (another 1980 entry took the New Year's Evil title, while 1981 saw the inevitable Graduation Day as filmmakers quickly ran out of days to exploit); a group of post-teens/young adults in an isolated environment where they can wander off, pair off and be picked off; an ineffectual authority figure in the form of legendary character actor Ben Johnson's guard; and, to top it all off, Jamie Lee Curtis as the “final girl”.

In terms of a unique selling proposition it's got magician David Copperfield as the entertainer hired by Sigma Phi for the evening. But perhaps he's also the killer – whose hobby was also magic – out to slay 'em for real…

Benefiting from a claustrophobic environment, Terror Train suffers from its sheer predictability – watching it, we inadvertently guessed the killer's identify and disguise – and a lack of pace until the final killer/girl showdown, with too much of Copperfield demonstrating his illusions and not enough of the make-up and FX men showcasing theirs.

This Region 2 DVD from Anchor Bay is one of their lesser entries, with the only extras biographies and a photo gallery – you guess neither Spottiswoode nor Curtis was available for commen(ary). There is, however, an optional 5.1 mix. While the original film was framed at 1.85:1, the release is panned and scanned to 4:3, though the nature of the interiors lead one to suspect that there's not much being lost, Halloween style, from the peripheries of the frame.