Mary Walsh

(On Cable TV, December 2022) I’m not sure anyone was really asking for a remake of the Canadian slasher “classic” Terror Train, but producers have their own mercenary motives and so now we have another updated piece of Can-Con ready for looping cable-TV showings. (I’m not kidding—the credits reveal that the film was partially financed by Canadian cable-TV channel Crave.)  The ludicrous premise of the original remains intact, as a bunch of college-age students (plus a magician and a few train workers) board a non-stop train on New Year’s Eve and then suffer through both a magic show and a psychotic killer stabbing everyone unlucky enough to be alone. There’s a logic to it all, of course, as suggested by the non-railway prologue, and a logic that does change from the original to borrow from one of the most famous slashers of all time. But you’re not really watching Terror Train for the plot, right? If you’re a gore-hound, you’re really interested in the escalating kills. If you’re slightly less of a horror fan, you may get to enjoy the atmosphere of a train on a long nighttime trip with everyone getting slaughtered inside. For those with good memories of the original, there isn’t much to see here—there have been updates to bring the setting forward by forty years (most notably ditching the idea of an all-white cast, although cell phones are not allowed for plot reasons), the patter is more contemporary and Jamie Lee Curtis has been replaced by the rather more attractive Robyn Alomar, while Canadian comedy icon Mary Walsh gets a decidedly non-comic role as the train conductor. Elsewhere in the cast, I rather liked Nadine Bhabha as a helpful train employee, while Tim Rozon has a nicely rumpled edge as the magician (although he can’t quite displace the fact that David Copperfield played the original character). Otherwise, this remade Terror Train is very much a low-budget slasher lightly updated. The gore didn’t strike me as extreme (always a plus), but there’s no hiding that it’s still a slasher. Saying that I didn’t hate it is actually praise from me in that genre, but I won’t try to pretend it’s much more than an easy casual cash-in with no ulterior ambitions. Amazingly enough, there’s a Terror Train 2 already on the schedule, which tells you much about the true intentions of this one.