Train

Not exactly sure what I was expecting with this one. I figured, hey, Thora Birch is in this, it can't be ALL bad. A bunch of American kids traveling around in a train getting terrorized in some fashion... sounds watchable. Unfortunately, I was not satisfied.

If my comment title hasn't tipped you off yet, you're in for an hour and a half of equal parts torture porn and survival horror. There's nothing new here and no worth while twists to raise this movie above (or even up to the level of) many similar genre pictures. It seems to meas if all the horror directors have tired of setting their pictures in the rural south, invariably populated with crazed backwoods cannibals and have instead focused on semi-fictional demonic visions of Eastern Europe populated by depraved butchers for hire. The acting is flat and the characters are so unlikeable (not to mention the lack of definition or development) you just can't muster any emotional ties. You won't even find yourself rooting for the bad guy here... you just won't care.

There is one facet of the movie that does seem to shine though. Love it or hate it, the gore in this film is so over the top and just down right rotten and visceral that it will produce a response. The camera does not flinch away... ever. I guess we're all just too complacent as horror fans these days. Gore like this used to be able to carry a film on the merits of the blood spilled alone, as the super bloody extreme cinema was relatively rare, often found only in hard core Asian productions. Now, every movie you watch seems to be teeming with so much of it that we as fans are beginning to demand more than just a slasher guts fest.

There are so many cool horror movies out there that invest their time and effort in delivering more in terms of originality. Unless you're curious, I would seek out something with more depth.

TRAIN is a one-note film with a one-note idea: somebody, somewhere said "let's make HOSTEL and set it on a train". The project was greenlight, and this movie was born, a vehicle for former Hollywood starlet Thora Birch produced by her former porn star father, Jack.

And, unsurprisingly, it turns out to be pretty rubbish. This is low budget, xenophobic nonsense throughout, shot in Eastern Europe and happily ripping off HOSTEL left, right, and centre. The story goes that a group of American gymnastics students are stranded abroad and suckered into boarding a decidedly dodgy train, where the usual shenanigans arise. This is a torture porn film and nothing else, so whether you enjoy it or not depends on how much you like seeing people getting bits snipped off them at frequent intervals.

The film boasts poor acting, one note characterisation, and bad direction. Thora Birch is just about adequate as the heroine, but the rest of the cast aren't up to much - apart from Gideon Emery perhaps, as the only distinctive one of the group (he's playing a gay, dope-smoking elder who hooks up with the rest). The villainous motivations are ludicrous, and the film really drags despite the plentiful action and many death sequences. I was also surprised at the sheer number of plot holes and goofs along the way, which indicates it was probably written and rushed out in a hurry to cash in on the success of the (thankfully) short-lived "torture porn" genre. In any case, it's a dog of a film.

I probably should have known this was going to be, or at least akin to being, "torture porn", or the gratuitous slicing and dicing of people without any of the suspense, but I didn't expect this low-rent movie starring Thora Birch to be just so unpleasant, in its style and mood and its delivery. It doesn't help that the cast mostly looks like the understudies of other actors (that one guy is a dead ringer for Denis Leary, another one for European Cameron Diaz) and none of them can act very well (Birch, of course, being a master thespian of under-acting if that's possible). But any moment that a suspenseful walking/creeping around should work it doesn't, and any moment that we're supposed to be icked or frightened by the next gashing-out of blood is just stupid in its excessiveness.

It also doesn't help at all that the logic is twisted; there's a train that kidnaps unwitting people into using their bodies on the black market, okay, I'll bite, maybe it's like Taken on a Train (ho-ho). Even then there's little thought put into it; they're organ-removers basically- a little like the people in Hostel only providing a "service" albeit extremely criminal and psychopathic and with some of the usual big galuts in tandem. But what about what's usually done with organ removing and transplanting like, I don't know, a CLEAN ROOM! It's one thing to be evil East-Euro organ removers, it's another thing to be incompetent while doing it.

Also, the ending is one of the lamest in modern cinematic memory, even if it's straight-to-video. There's little to recommend about it except for a few (unintentional) laughs early on before the Olympic team gets on the train and parties down at an overly-red-lit nightclub.

STAR RATING: ***** Saturday Night **** Friday Night *** Friday Morning ** Sunday Night * Monday Morning

A group of young American athletes head to Germany to compete in a grappling competition, with mixed success. However, a mix up at the railway station compromises their trip home, leaving them stranded...until a mysterious woman offers them all a trip back on her luxury carriage. They are struck by the hospitality...only to find as the journey progresses, they are on a train of psychopaths who want their organs and will stop at nothing to get them.

Train probably forwent it's right to a cinema release on these shores for appearing so generic and predictable. Take a typical bunch of obnoxious American teens (the only one I could make out of any of them being Thora Birch) place them in a plot eerily similar to Hostel and then, add the even more common denominator today of being a typical 'torture porn' flick where the emphasis is far more on blood and gore than genuine scares. And indeed, the film never achieves anything resembling a claustrophobic air of tension or terror, just a stumbling stutter from one clunky set up to the next. Not surprising, given the plot line is so far fetched and implausible from the off set. Nonetheless, it could have managed as a genuinely creepy and atmospheric film...but by selling out and being just another of the many bottom of the barrel 'torture porn' flicks that you could forget about as easy as that. **

At the beginning of the film i felt like i had seen it a dozen times before, the usual ensemble of college students and a couple of teachers...you know!

However within a very short space of time i was drawn into the storyline of the film, and there actually is a plot to follow!

I hadn't read anything about the film before i watched it so spent most off the film saying "No way!" mostly quite shocked at the content of the film and the implications of the plot...

I don't want to write any spoilers so let me say that it is a thriller/horror well worth seeing and anyone who liked a film like Hostel will like this one too and enjoy it...i did:-)