Train (2008)

(In French, On Cable TV, July 2021) Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Young American teenagers go backpacking in Eastern Europe and—why, yes, they all get tortured grotesquely, how did you know? Riffing off ultra-familiar clichés, Train really does itself no favours by hopping on roughly a dozen wagons’ worth of stale material at once. The teenagers (well, twentysomething teenagers) are not particularly likable even if some of them do wrestling: the portents of their impending doom are so strident that it’s a wonder they don’t put their fingers in their ears, and once the torture gets started, the film instantly switches from familiarity to obnoxiousness. It’s easy to be exasperated by ultra-violent nihilistic gore when it’s in the service of material as useless as Train: it exposes the immaturity of the project and its lack of ideas or, for that matter, humanity. Exactly no one will be surprised to find out that the lone girl in the group (Thora Birch, maybe slumming) becomes the final girl of the group. Grasping at anything nice to say about the result, the least we can say is that writer-director Gideon Raff is capable of churning out a slick studio-grade production, but that comes to mind only because I’ve seen two MST3K-grade piles of garbage this week alone, so my expectations have been calibrated. The irony is that the project reportedly started out as a remake of 1980’s Terror Train, which would have been a semi-intriguing idea… except that it instead went all-in on the worst of the horror genre trends of the late 2000s (i.e.: torture horror) and instantly became forgettable.