Trem da Morte

With a budget of $27.00, by the looks of it.

Ok, it's only March but I'm willing to guarantee this will be the worst movie I see this year (Christ, I hope it is!)

It's obvious the makers of this flick looked at the basic premise and format from DIE HARD, and simply transferred it onto a train, believing that all they then had to do was have the good guy and bad guys shooting at each other for 90 minutes and the magic (and profit) of DIE HARD would be repeated. Wrong. DIE HARD was a successful fusion of blockbuster spectacle and sublime classical narrative that has yet to be repeated, whereas DEATH ON A TRAIN is just a bunch of bad actors shooting at each other.

The acting in this movie is terrible throughout, although it is difficult to see how even an accomplished actor could make anything of the cliched, expletive-strewn lines this lot are forced to utter. Bryan Genesse, as our hero, flits around in a long leather coat for the duration - he looks very cool, but it's hardly the attire of choice for an action hero repeatedly clambering over a train. He is also as bad a shot as the villains - the movie is crammed with interminable gunfights in which nobody fires anywhere near their opponent. And Bentley Mitchum, looking a bit like a chubby Tim Curry, is simply horrible as the villain. So over the top is his performance, it has a dreadful sort of fascination that compels you to keep watching until the bitter end, just to see how much worse his over-acting can get.

If you value your sanity steer clear of this movie.

This is possibly the most horrific film in history. (Maybe even worse than 'The Mummy Returns')

The special effects looked like they were compiled in Microsoft Paint. Horrendous. The acting was incredible. The thought that these people were actually being paid for this is incredible. The gun fights were about as sharp as Ade Akinbiyi's shooting, were they actually pretending to aim for people or aiming to miss?

Could they not afford extras? One moment there were three people sat in the back of a carraige and within minutes all the "terrorists" had forgotten they were there.

And what was with the mexican train driver? Surely this was a joke. Or do all mexican train drivers listen to that music whilst swigging tequila?

This was entertaining, almost as entertaining as guessing where the train would be in the next scene. Speeding across a bridge, rolling into a station, standing still in the middle of the woods?

I don't mean to bum anyone out right at the beginning of a review, but this is a pretty sucky movie. Sucky on the point of being dreadful. Produced during that period in the early 2000s when the Nu Image studio couldn't make a good movie for neither love nor money, it's an annoying exercise in mundanity. Nearing the end of his career as an action hero, lead star Bryan Genesse does what little he can to make this one stand out but only manages to save it from a rock-bottom rating.

The story: When a gang of arrested thieves (led by Bentley Mitchum) takes over the train transporting them to prison and makes hostages of the passengers, it's up to their captor (Genesse) to end the crisis.

The film was probably made under very limited means, as evidenced by the frequent use of stock footage. The exterior shots of the train are taken from a movie shot in British Columbia, and seeing the filmmakers try to pass off this landscape as the Mexican countryside is kinda goofy. So is the casting: like many Nu Image flicks, this one's supporting roles are predominantly played by Bulgarian performers, and if you think it's been interesting listening to East Europeans fake English dialogue, just wait 'til you hear 'em speaking Spanish. Before long, it seems too much to take for even the producers, who end up dubbing most of the Spanish. Disappointingly, they did not dub Bentley Mitchum's lines. Mitchum is a fair character actor but his performance here is atrocious. The screenplay is clearly going the "crazy dangerous" route with its villain, but this comes across as irredeemably annoying, with Mitchum spewing adolescent threats and insults while largely failing at being intimidating.

Even though the movie makes a point of focusing on various hostages who don't actually affect the story too much, one guy who doesn't get much of a personality at all is the hero. When he first appeared, I thought Bryan Genesse was a side character because of his lack of charisma, and he never gains any throughout the runtime. Genesse was apparently on board with the movie, performing his own stunts while running across and hopping about the moving train, but he's just so generic here that the role could have been played by anybody. This homogeny carries over to the action content, which is comprised mainly of shootouts and a few explosions. Genesse only has two fight scenes, and while the brawl with Mitchum came as a surprise for being anything other than dismal, they're not worth talking about.

DEATH TRAIN doesn't bear thinking about too much: I get grumpy about having wasted my money and want to rate it even lower. I can't recommend it to anyone, and hope that it only finds its way into the hands of its particular niche audience – whoever that may include.

This movie was terrible. I can't believe I sat through it all. I'm ranking it down there with Basket Case 3. So many screw ups that after awhile I started to wonder if they watched the movie after making the final cut to make sure no screw ups were left. Yes folks, it's that bad.

Many of the characters in DEATH TRAIN are just like the ones you`d see in a disaster movie : The young pretty attendant , the young couple in love , the young crippled boy and the man of god . There`s a couple in nuns in there too and I was expecting them to pull out a guitar and give a singalong but fortunately this doesn`t happen . Unfortunately this doesn`t stop DEATH TRAIN from being a bad movie .

As everyone else has noticed ( And unless you`re blind , deaf and dumb it`s impossible not to notice ) DEATH TRAIN is more or less a DIE HARD clone set on a train except it doesn`t have any brain or intentional humour to it . There are laughs of course but I don`t think they were actually in the script . Remember that NAKED GUN film where Frank and the bad guy are shooting at one another behind the bin - the same bin ? well there`s a couple of sequences like that where the hero is in a gun battle with the bad guys and no matter how close they are no one gets shot , at least not untill the script requires someone to die . Plus the film is full of entirely dumb bits like hostages trying to jump the baddies only for them to be shot , this happens several times in fact which led me to ask what on earth made the hostages want to be dead heroes for ? Without doubt the dumbest bit of the film is when the hostages are left unguarded and none of them think about jumping off the train , a train that`s only going 20 mph , this isn`t a continuity error as someone commented , the action switches to the train cab and you can clearly see the speedometer that reads 20 mph

Despite not liking this film I guess it could have been worse - It could have used scenes from UNDER SIEGE 2