For all the great and classic horror movies that we come to know and love, there are plenty that get tossed to the side once they’ve been released for one reason or another. In the past several decades there have been many horror movies that have suffered this fate, and Terror Train is just one out of the many that a lot of people have likely forgotten. Apart from starring Jamie Lee Curtis, this movie didn’t have anything else going for it other than the fact that it was a strange and violent horror movie that had the effect of frustrating the viewers since trying to figure out who the killer was going after wasn’t too difficult. But for the time period, it wasn’t horrible enough to simply forget since to be serious, it was something that should have been given a little more consideration in terms of the overall script and the idea. With some creative editing and a lot of serious updating, this movie could actually be kind of interesting to bring into the current time period since it might be able to make use of a lot of different elements that might be possible to pull off since the idea of using trains isn’t outdated yet, and it’s likely that someone might enjoy the challenge. The probability of bringing Jamie Lee Curtis back would be hard to comment on since there’s no guarantee that she would do it, but it does feel as though this idea might be worth another look.
The overall story is fairly simple since it begins with a rather cruel prank that’s pulled during a New Year’s Eve party when Curtis’ character lures a fellow party-goer into a dark place on the premise of having sex. Unfortunately, what ends up happening is that the pledge she seduces is set up with a cadaver from the medical school, and when he finds out the pledge is horrified and later on admitted to a psychiatric hospital. Three years later the group of friends are having another party, this time on a train, and have made it a costume part as well, so one can only imagine just how it would go since being able to hide behind a mask would enable just about any killer to walk about unsuspected until they made their move. When the killer does start targeting the students it becomes a nightmare since the party-goers have to wonder whether the corpses that are popping up are real or if they’re just for effect. But as people continue to be bumped off and found in various spaces in the train it becomes horribly obvious that this isn’t a prank and that it isn’t fake. The only problem is discovering who the killer is and how to get the person off the train since as you can imagine, the killer is the same person that was sent to the psychiatric hospital years before.
There are more than a few ways that this movie could be updated and a lot of them tend to pop out all on their own since placing this story on a train would still be a must since the danger of it is what kind of drives the story and the mystery of who the killer is does heighten the suspense. But there would be things that needed to change since the whole idea of the killer hanging on to the underside of the train after being dumped off feels a bit worn and too impractical, while each kill might need to be revamped just a bit in order to make it a little more exciting and hopefully less easy to predict. This is a common staple of a lot of horror movies though since one can almost draw a diagram of who’s going to die next thanks to too much foreshadowing. Perhaps it would be a good idea to let certain people live a bit longer and kill them when no one is looking or when no one expects it. People have even come to expect that since horror movies that work on a set formula tend to be very predictable and can be mapped out within the first half-hour of the movie sometimes. It has to do with character development, their attitudes towards the surrounding scenery and the situation, and many other factors that go into deciding who’s going to get it and when.
Sometimes it’s nice to see a horror movie that can’t be predicted as easily, but remaking this movie would take a lot of interest since it feels that many people might have forgotten it over the years. The movie wasn’t such a huge success that it was a tragedy to forget it, but it did manage to earn back its budget and then some.
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