Train Ride to Hollywood

Train Ride to Hollywood is a musical comedy. Bloodstone's Harry Williams is fascinated with Hollywood and its famous actors of old. He falls and hits his head just before going on stage, no thanks to their producer (Michael Payne) tugging on his leg. The movie is his dream, a goofy dream at that.

There are auditions in Hollywood and they need to take a three-day train ride to get there. The only problem is they don't have the money for train tickets. So they trick real railway workers and steal their uniforms. The train's passengers consist of a Sheikh and his harem, W.C. Fields, Scarlett O'Hara and Rhett Butler, a loveable Dracula, The Godfather, Humphrey Bogart, Jean Harlow, Nelson Eddie and Jeanette MacDaonald and others. Bloodstone turns into detectives ala Sherlock Holmes following a double murder. Guess the killer couldn't stand Nelson Eddie and Jeanette MacDonald's continuous singing. A wacky funeral, fight with a gorilla, and threat of being turned into a wax museum figure are all part of Harry's dream.

Dance numbers are good especially the memorable Train Ride number filmed in L.A's Union Station. (Funny thing is they start at Union station and end there). I've watched it over and over again. Charles McCormick and his falsetto voice are wonderful in the number with the Rhythm professor. Charles Love singing to Tracy Reed is also great to watch. Too bad there is no soundtrack for this film. The movie is overall fun.

This is a fun, silly movie which takes very bizarre and unexpected turns. But I've watched the "Train Ride" musical number over and over again. It's worth the rental. As they say, "Get your ticket get your ticket you gotta have a ticket for this train ride..."

This really is pathetic. Nothing to recommend it other than 2 good oldies. Bad acting, bad direction, bad script, bad music. How did this movie ever get made...and released by a major studio! You can buy the movie Letter-boxed, but why anyone would want to is beyond me (unless of course they're in it, but I'd be too embarrassed to admit to that).

I saw 'Train Ride To Hollywood' on cable TV as a kid a couple of years or so after it was in the theaters, and it is the weirdest musical I have ever seen. Some scenes in this movie made me cringe, and other scenes were flat-out painful to watch. What redeems 'Train Ride To Hollywood' is the music.

Bloodstone were a great band, and their interpretations of old songs and their own material blended seamlessly here. The "Rock and Roll Choo-Choo" and "Money (That's What I Want)" scenes stand out for Bloodstone's ability to assert themselves as ROCK AND ROLL musicians, reclaiming rock and roll as black music and delivering memorable performances (the "Money" scene gives us Willis Draffen doing a Chuck Berry duck walk to put the exclamation point on rock and roll as black music while Harry Williams delivers an astonishing vocal).

I would have changed the storyline considerably by getting rid of one character (the snooty director who keeps getting pied) and possibly coming up with a different one instead, and also rewriting the murder "mystery" subplot, but hey, too late. The two non-Bloodstone performances that stand out are Guy Marks as Humphrey Bogart and Roberta Collins as Jean Harlow, whose take on the 1930s blonde legend is haunting. Collins could have had a great career if her hard partying hadn't ruined her.

Members of the 70's pop/soul group Bloodstone ("Natural High") enter a dream sequence in which they disguise themselves as porters to get to Hollywood for an audition. Also on the train are cheap impersonators of Bogie, W.C. Fields, Rhett and Scarlet, Jeanette and Nelson, Bela Lugosi, plus a sheik and his harem. Some fine musical numbers liven up a rather hackneyed self-referential movie. Still an interesting trip for cinema fans, and more economical than the later star-laden failure "Won Ton Ton, the Dog Who Saved Hollywood."