Il treno

Amok Train ( a far better title) tells the tale of a group of American students on a study trip in Serbia who are first terrorized by an evil village, and then by a runaway train they they attempt to escape on. It's all because one of the students is a "chosen one" of a group of devil worshippers.

The film has so much going on, it's never boring, even if some of the story and acting are a bit hokey, there are always plenty of things to look at and some outrageous gore is showcased, including a face being pulled off, decapitations, impalements galore, and quite a shocking dismemberment of one poor guy caught between moving carriages.

Actually some of the most frightening scenes of the movie are those depicting the actors being filmed on the moving train. We see them running alongside and jumping aboard, clambering over the top of it, hanging off the sides and dangling between the couplings - all while the train is clearly moving at some speed. I don't know how they filmed all of this, it looks completely hair-raising. If these are faked via special effects, then I take my hat off in admiration.

There are some rather shonky miniature models that spoil some of the tension, but the movie is otherwise beautifully photographed, and the music is great too. It's bursting with energy and great visuals, reminiscent of Lamberto Bava's "Demons" , and the more obscure "Spider Labyrinth", so if you have seen and enjoyed either of those, and can suspend your criticisms, you'll have fun with this.

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.

Forget about the unrelated title "Beyond the Door III", as its better represented under "Death Train" or "Amok Train". What starts off as an optimistically ominous Italian supernatural occult feature eventually falls into cheesy and senseless absurdness, but even so it manages to stay reasonably diverting. The premise's opening build up is atmospheric, spooky and alienating, but when the staged action hit's the train it becomes ludicrously brainless. Forget about making any sense of it (yep it's strange and baffling), and just go along for the unpredictable, but farcical train ride of 'doom'. Director Jeff Kwitny uses the creepy, louring, out-cast East European environment to great effect, and ups the tatty, macabre gore effects when it counted. He plasters it with cheap shocks, but the outrageously graphic deaths are amusingly inventive and impulsive. There are some memorable ones too. An inane script and wishy-washy story is made up of frantic ideas, and novelties that never really seem to come together, but at least it stays in character by keeping the story moving like a speeding train. Some sequences involving the run-away train (that's ritually controlled by Satanists) are balefully destructive, but other times you get a good laugh when the miniature train model comes into play. Adolfo Bartou's sweepingly agile and large scale cinematography is very well-implemented, and at times looked to good for such a production. Telegraphing nearly everything is the pounding, dread-induced music score of generically leering and terrible cues. The performances are pretty wretched, but Bo Svenson's little screen time makes an impression.

Beyond the Door III (1989) is an Italian horror movie that I recently watched on Prime. The storyline follows a young virgin American college coed who is tricked into traveling to Yugoslavia to witness a pagan ritual to bring back Satan. She doesn't know the part she has to play in the ritual that includes sacrificing a virgin....

This movie is directed by Jeff Kwitny (Illegal Alien) and stars Mary Kohnert (Star Trek: The Next Generation), Bo Svenson (Inglorious Basterds), Victoria Zinny (The Tunnel) and Alex Vitale (The Bronx Executioner).

This was a fun watch even if it was a fairly average addition to the horror genre. The car crash opening was well executed, much like Beyond the Door. The mother in this was crazy, as was the soup sequences. The makeup and props were uneven with some elements really well done and some not so much. The model train they used to create the crash scene cracked me up. The "kiss me" sequence was the highlight of the movie and very well done too. The plane ending was solid and a perfect way to end the movie. Oh, and there's no Beyond the Door II, the marketing team just wanted to name the movie after the original Beyond the Door and thought this was clever, even if this isn't a sequel.

Overall, this isn't anything special but is still worth a watch. I would score this a 6/10 and recommend seeing it once.

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.