The Sleeping Car

This one would be just an average horror B-movie, reasonably well done from what I could judge from a pan&scanned video, but the characters makes up for the ludicrous premise : they are lively and fun. There are illogisms, as usual, but the overall fun atmosphere makes it worth viewing for genre fans. And there is a first : death by couch springs !

"The Sleeping Car" is a pretty insignificant and worthless horror film that is made endurable by a couple of nice special effects and a neat supporting role by Kevin McCarthy. The plot revolves on an over-aged journalism student Jason (David McNaughton from "American Werewolf in London) who rents an old, refurnished train carriage to live in. This carriage – the sleeping car – is possessed by the spirit of "the Mister", the landlady's late husband who was responsible for a huge train crash ten years earlier. The screenplay doesn't make that much sense, but you can hardly consider that an obstacle in early 90's horror movies. There's some nice murdering and the female lead Judie Aronson is yummy. What's really annoying about the "the Sleeping Car" are the constant witty remarks of protagonist Jason McCree. He uses a supposedly funny one-liner every time his character does or says something. Even in the climax, when he's fighting (?) the demon, he interrupts the action for a lousy remark...Very annoying.

My review was written in March 1990 after watching the film on Vidmark video cassette.

"The Sleeping Car' is an above-average horror flick released theatrically Feb. 2 in regional markets such as Pittsburgh and Nashville ahead of it video debut in mid-May.

Effort by Vidmark aimed at theatrical audiences would probably have gotten a better shot several years ago before horror pics glutted the market.

It has a stronger plot and cast than usual in limning the familiar tale of haunting, in this case a railroad car that was the scene of sex and murder ten years earlier.

David Naughton is a little long in the tooth, but effective anyway, as the hero on the rebound from a failed marriage (with Dani Minnick) who goes back to school to study journalism with hip prof Jeff Conaway (a fun performance).

He rents the sleeping car as a cheap abode from goofy landlady Ernestinge Mercer and has '60s hippie leftover Kevin McCarthy as an even goofier neighbor. Thanks to interesting gore and makeup effects by John Carl Buechler (also doubling as actor in the ten-years-earlier segments), pic's depiction of poltergeist appearances has some novelty and drive.

Douglas Curtis pilots the picture with self-assurance, stumbling only in a series of false wakeup endings that are a direct lift from John Landis' "An American Werewolf in London", which also starred Naughton.

Greg O'Neill's flippant and unpretentious script is refreshing, giving Naughton plenty of tongue-in-cheek rejoinders to lighten up the film and establish a tone early on that's amplified by Conaway' "everything is everything" approach.

Judie Aronson, who made a nice impression in a small role in "Cool Blue", is an unusual looking beauty who is arresting as the sexually liberated romantic lead. Effects by Buechler and others are solid.

Perhaps I am being generous with this one, considering I just watched Suspiria, but I found this to be a very colourful, interesting looking movie, with a lot of atmospheric blue lighting contrasted against deep reds , bright yellows, and it has a couple of clever moments (including death by fold-up sofa, probably the most memorable) and it has a good look to it, overall, but.....

So much of the dialogue is poorly written, unfunny one-liners, the characters become annoying, and even at a brief 80-minutes, this tale of a man living in a converted train car, haunted by the spirit of John Karl Beuchler, seems padded, with its especially drawn out ending taking up nearly fifteen minutes of the run time.

Still, it isn't *terrible*, and might be worth a single watch, for fans of cheeseball 1980s horror, but anything more than that is asking too much from this one.

Still no proper release so far for this horror made in a time when horror was a not done and was almost death. Some big names from the genre in it, David Naughton of An American Werewolf In London (1981) and Kevin McCarthy and special effects man John Carl Buechler as The Mister.

It take a while before the horror comes in, Jason (Naughton) is just divorced and is searching for a new place to stay, one he finds in an abandoned train car. But from the start we know something happened with the freight train and let this be a car from that accident. Jason awakes the ghost of the landlady's husband. A thing he better did not.

The first half hour we go a bit into the characters with some comedy elements, especially at school. Jason got befriended with Kim (Judie Aronson) which he falls in love with but he still has nightmares of his ex Joanna (Dani Minnick).

There's a bit of nudity here and there with the typical saxophone music. Judie Aronson shows her breasts while having sex with Jason. There's a bit of red stuff and at the end we do see the real Mister but by then it's all too late. Kevin wasn't convincing at all and even looked ridiculous. This is as I said it a thousand times before a perfect example why horror was on a low base around the time being made.

Gore 0/5 Nudity 1/5 Effects 2/5 Story 2,5/5 Comedy 0/5