Film Summary DCCCXX (Horror Express)

 


The plot here is simple enough. Captain Caveman murders people with his psychic eyeball powers and sometimes steals their bodies to stay incognito.

Rreally, I was expecting some sort of a mummy or werewolf monster movie on a train. 
Like it would be this killer creature that would roam around massacring people and everybody wouldn't believe that the creature was real. 
They'd think Christopher Lee or Peter Cushing where the murderer and they have to try and convince everyone that the monster was real. 

But that doesn't happen at all. Everybody finds out that the Frozen Monster is actually killing people pretty early on and then it has some strange power where it can murder you with it's eyes, steal your memories and even transfer into your body if need to be. 
It's also an alien that's been around for millions of years who wishes to leave the planet and requires the knowledge of modern humans to do so.
There's also a crazy priest who's the biggest adversary of the monster but then loves the monster out of nowhere. There's a bunch of weird metaphors about the devil that are present at the beginning of the movie and then disappear. 
There's also a spy plot involving this one woman who you think would end up in a romantic relationship with Christopher Lee but then she just dies. 

I swear this movie has like 20 different plots in it and they just dropped most of them at random points. So they can introduce new points and new weird powers to this monster and that's all before Telly Savalas shows up the save this movie from both mediocrity and confusion, by completely stealing the scene and lovingly chewing the scenery. 
But unfortunately they drop him out of the movie and the whole Affair goes back to being confused again. 
It feels like 20 different writers wanted to make 15 different movies and nobody was entirely sure on what they do. 
So they just threw everything out there and hoped to God that it would work out. 
And it's only an hour and 20 minutes long. The film's too short, the stories to convoluted and the acting (though decent enough for what it is) just can't save this movie from being a big old mess. 

Although I do like all the props and the general atmosphere of the film. Everybody's travelling on this Russian Express train through northern China and later Siberia and because of the ridiculous plot line the pacing never really slows down. So what has that going for it.

If you're watching this movie expecting Great Performances out of Christopher Lee or Peter Cushing then you may want to look elsewhere. They're technically the protagonist but because of the ridiculous plot lines pepper throughout the movie they just don't feel like they have enough time to do anything. No one does for that matter. Everything feels a little too rushed it would just not given enough to really sink our teeth into.

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