Train
Reviewed by Edward Larsen Terkelsen

USA, R, 94 m, 2008
Directed by Gideon Raff. Stars Thora Birch, Gideon Emery, Kavan Reece, et al.

Train, which had a theatrical run of all of one night at Grauman Mann’s Chinese 6 during last year’s Screamfest, was released this month on DVD with nary a trumpet blast, meaning that Red Box patrons will have access to yet another horror show that they’ve heard nothing about and will most likely not even bother looking into. That’s probably just as well; Train is repugnant fare. Of course, gorehounds will be happy as clams at high water to ride this choo-choo to Hell, but everyone else—especially those who detested Hostel—would be smart to hitch a ride with Thomas or Gordon or Percy and spend some quality time on the island of Sodor. (Never underestimate the power of children’s TV to rid your head of scary thoughts.) I can’t say that Train is a badly made film, but the fact that it’s so unashamedly emulative of Hostel makes it deserving of each and every pan that threatens to derail its success. Hostel, after all, was a smelly heap that helped give rise to the morally questionable, socially irresponsible sub-genre known as “torture porn.” I can’t make out the voice of the creative force behind Train; the unholy thing chugs along as if Eli Roth himself was conducting it. 

Train has no real destination; it just moves from one ugly bit to another until it runs flat out of steam. The story (which has more holes than the arm of a Pakistani heroin addict) concerns a team of American collegiate wrestlers who are riding the rails through Eastern Europe to attend a big tournament in Odessa. During a stop over in some craphole town or another, the kids blow off their curfew and partake in some hearty partying, causing them to miss their train the next morning. This doesn’t please their hard-ass coach (Todd Jensen), who reads them the riot act for being so careless with their futures. (Yeah, as if any of these kids—especially the girls—are going to make a career out of wrasslin’.) Enter a skinny, blonde (and rather unhealthy looking) femme fatale, played with sleazy gusto by Koyna Ruseva from Moeto manichko nishto. She tells the coach that she’s about to get on another train that’s headed for the same place that he and his group need to go, so the coach, hoping to tap her bony ass, herds everyone on board without seeming to mind that the train has an air that’s about as friendly as the Sonderzuge that transported the Jews to the Nazi death camps. But he soon learns—the hard way—that the spider woman is a doctor who has less regard for the Hippocratic Oath than Josef Mengele: she’s making off with hard-wearing human subjects and selling their organs to the ailing stiffs in first class. It’s de rigueur in these brainless scare-a-thons for the mad medics to employ grotesques to do all their dirty work, and Train’s demented doc is no exception. But her helpers—sadistic retards all—aren’t content to just take the organs they need and call it a day; they have to beat, torture, maim, rape, and even spend a penny on their victims. Oddly, the script by director Gideon Raff doesn’t permit the hapless young’ns to use what they’ve learned on the mat to fight off their attackers; they’re easily subdued and then cut up in increasingly unkind ways until only one is left breathing, a tomboy played by the terribly miscast Thora Birch. (She’s incapable of emoting convincingly when the action requires it, so I don’t see her making much of a living as a scream queen.) Unlike those wretched Hostel movies (and their many wretched imitators), Train sees to it that the transgressors are punished, but the manner in which they’re done away with is disappointingly quick and clean. The slaughter of the innocent, however, is obsessed over and shown in sinfully graphic detail. Raff has visual flair, but he’s wasting it on pseudo-snuff. 

November 30, 2009 

© Copyright 2009 by Edward Larsen Terkelsen. All rights reserved.