Amok Train - Fahrt ins Nichts

A group of students gets this supposedly great opportunity to witness ancient rituals in Europe, only to learn that they've been targeted for death. They head for the hills, and hop a train that starts barreling through the countryside once the crew has been decimated.

Re-christened "Beyond the Door III" to capitalize on the otherwise unrelated Italian horror films, "Death Train", or "Amok Train", is a generally good time. The viewer WILL have to put up with the expected cheesy acting and goofy plotting, but director Jeff Kwitny does manage to make up for this with a respectable amount of menace & atmosphere. The setting is the most unusual aspect, making this a sort of genre spin on the earlier critical favorite "Runaway Train".

People looking for great European horror nonsense will find a fair bit to enjoy here, as there is some absolutely great gore coupled with some memorable murder set pieces. The film does get off to a rough start, but improves once the assorted expendable victims get on the train; the final half hour is the best part.

The acting may not be quality acting, but most of it is sincere enough. Mary Kohnert ('Star Trek: The Next Generation', "Big Man on Campus") is appealing in the lead, and token name actor Bo Svenson ("Special Delivery", "The Delta Force") does an amusing job of hamming it up a bit as a dubious professor.

Overall, decent entertainment for fans of this kind of thing.

Six out of 10.

Sometimes you stumble over those kind of movies where the main and haunting question is - what the heck did the writer(s) smoke!? Beyond the Door III aka Amok Train aka Death Train is such a movie. What we get is some ancient satanic ritual in a rural community of Yugoslavia mixed with a good part of what is some kind of early and low budget Unstoppable (Denzel Washington, Chris Pine, 2010) - in one scene the runaway (demon-possessed!?) train even drives thru a small lake without any railway tracks just to kill some of the poor Americans! But on the other side we get a fine sniff of gore here and there and some well composed dark and weird mood including some satanic ritual (just too delicious the scene where the old witch screams: she's not a ******!) and some fine visuals (for a B-movie).

My rate would be a straight 5 but for the smoking question I add 1 more - so my overall rate is a well-deserved 6.

Beyond the Door III (1989)

* 1/2 (out of 4)

In 1974 the Italian film CHI SEI? was released in America as BEYOND THE DOOR. The film was one of many rips of THE EXORCIST but it made enough money to where future producers would remember the "new" title. In 1979 Mario Bava made a film called SHOCK but since the title wasn't catchy enough it was renamed BEYOND THE DOOR II even though it had nothing to do with the first film. Then, in 1989, there was AMOK TRAIN, another weak title that couldn't grab people so the producer's decided to call it BEYOND THE DOOR III. So, in a fifteen year period we had three films in the BEYOND THE DOOR series and yet it wasn't ever a real title or series for that matter. You gotta love these Italian name changes (check out DAWN OF THE DEAD and ZOMBI for more).

The "story" has seven American teenagers taking a school trip to Yugoslavia where they will witness a pre-Christian passion play. One of the girls (Mary Kohnert) doesn't want to go because she's actually from this small village but the group ends up there and soon the locals are trying to kill them. It turns out the girl is a virgin so she's prime material to become the wife of Lucifer. The kids end up on a train where they think they're making an escape but it's just leading them to one gruesome death after another. BEYOND THE DOOR III or AMOK TRAIN, whatever you want to call it, has some pretty good stuff going for it but sadly the story is just so bad and pointless that the majority of the running time you're wishing a train would run you over so you could get pass the boredom. Most of the movie takes place on this train and there's not a single thing going on. The kids talk about what's going on. A few new characters enter the picture. The kids talk some more and this just keeps going and going. I'm really confused why they'd build some beautiful sets of the villages and then only shoot there for what ends up being about ten-minutes worth of screen time. This village looks quite good and had a rather nice atmosphere so why they selected to go on the train is anyone's guess. The film runs 94-minutes in its uncut state and the majority of that time is just boring dialogue or we have a couple kids not on the train who walk around not doing a thing. The film actually does have some good things going for it with one being the cinematography by Adolfo Bartoli. There's no question this was an extra low-budget movie but you wouldn't know it just by looking at the film because it looks very professional and that's not hardly the case with these type of films. Another plus are the gore effects, which are quite good looking and since this is an Italian movie we get all sorts of bloody deaths. The first murder involves one of the strangest decapitations I've ever seen and things just get more gory from here including one sequence where a woman peels her face off. The Lucifer creature here is pretty silly looking though. Most of the cast is forgettable but we do get Bo Svenson in a brief role as the Professor. It's too bad a better screenplay wasn't written for this thing and it's a shame most of the time took place on the train because there are enough decent elements here that should have made for a better movie.

Alternatively known as Death Train, this horror flick really show amateur qualities, whether script ("write as you go" dialogue is unbelievably bad) directing, whatever. The film does retain a wide intrigued curiosity of story, and the graphic violence has a style, yet plot is muddled (really hard to follow), which is really the film's problem, if done at a rushed effort. Supposedly the story is of a group of lucky American students who go to Europe to witness a ritual, where the virgin girl of the group, unawares she's just lost her mother in a horrific and cruel car accident, is being set up in a sacrifice, where she must lose her virginity quick, as a slightly creepy Russian satanist (veteran Bo Svenson- the best performance I've seen out of the guy) attains her. When all escaping, they board the train, which turns out to be the one from hell, like that death ship, that brought evil and death. As only seeing the film a few times, the last time, only the other day, I didn't realize how gory this film was, most of it, thanks to that notorious killer train. You don't give two hoots about any of the characters except, our virgin a little, and her peers who seem to taunt her and cast her out, doesn't help their likability status. But amidst the sloppiness of the film, this forgettable flick still rises above this and it's other painfully palpable faults, which will warrant some more views in the future, but again Svenson, the show stealer, is fantastic.

Everyone who gave this movie a bad review is fired from EVER reviewing a b-horror movie again. There are two kinds of horror movies...There are the ones such as THE EXORCIST and HALLOWEEN which, for whatever reason, have mass appeal. And then there're the ones like BEYOND THE DOOR 3, obscure low budget oddities which suddenly appear on video store new release walls with a no-name cast and crew and really nothing to recommend them other than a really neat cover box. They're usually made on a shoestring budget with plots recycled from other movies. But they have only one goal and that is to entertain. And BEYOND THE DOOR 3 certainly succeeds in that area. I've seen this little gem of a flick more than a dozen times and I'm thoroughly entertained each time. To hell with characterizations and plodding plot devices, this little flick wants to entertain and scare you, and it does! When you rent a movie like BEYOND THE DOOR 3 you should have some idea of what's in store for you. Especially since it's a part 3 so you're renting it having probably seen the first two installments. So you shouldn't be disappointed because it's too cheesy or flatly directed, etc. That's what fans of these types of movies want. So shame on everyone who watched this movie and was disappointed. Go watch MATLOCK with Grandma, you sissies.