Movies
Train (V)
“Burdened with flat characters and lacking any genuine scares, even Train‘s abundant carnage can’t satisfy. It‘s a one-way ticket to ineptitude.”
With an opening credits montage that features a corpse getting disemboweled, skinned, and disassembled like a Thanksgiving turkey, Train is one of those horror movies that isn’t afraid to go for tit on the first date—you know its intentions the moment it shows up on your doorstep. Even though I consider myself a desensitized horror fanatic, I’ll admit that some scenes made me flinch and squirm like a little baby. It’s a gruesome movie, even by post-9/11 horror standards. (And I’m not even talking about the NC-17 version that screened at Screamfest…this is a review of the lowly R-rated DVD release.) But no amount of Hostel-ized evisceration or eyeball extraction can carry a movie this blatantly silly, no matter how realistic the gore might be.
A horribly miscast Thora Birch and her college wrestling team have traveled to Eastern Europe for a competition. After the wrestling tournament, the four friends and an assistant coach (Gideon Emery, an actor you may recognize from his copious videogame voiceover gigs) are lured to a seedy night club that specializes in techno, red gel lighting, and open-air orgies. Their clubbing adventures cause them to miss their early morning train to Odessa, which enrages the coach. After inquiring at the train station, a bug-eyed local woman approaches the coach and tips him off to a special independent train that will happily take the team to Odessa. All they have to do is walk out to the platform, climb aboard, and pay the fare to the skeezy conductor.
Train is so aggressively flawed, it’s almost entertaining. You can sit back on the couch and pick it apart like the plot of an elementary school stage play. So, the college kids leave for the club at 11pm, and it only seems like they’ve been there for about 20 minutes before they’re compelled to leave. So why is it dawn when they exit the club? I guess there must be 6 hours of clubbing footage in a cardboard box out in director Gideon Raff’s garage.
And once they discover that the independent train line only employs grimy, sweaty, wife-beater-clad European men, the students are strangely indifferent. When the leering train attendants demand to hold the students’ passports for the duration of the train ride, they hand over their documents after a couple of half-assed questions and a shrug. And after one of the wrestlers disappears after being dared to run through the train in his jockstrap, his friends decide to simply go to bed and look for him in the morning. It’s this kind of incompetent plotting that renders the movie borderline amusing at times.
As Hostel attempted to explain the motives of its thrill-killing villains, Train tries a similar move in its final third as it postulates why a bunch of creepy Eastern Europeans would choose to run a torture train up and down the countryside. It’s one of several blisteringly serious moments that provokes unintentional laughs. Burdened with flat characters and lacking any genuine scares, even Train‘s abundant carnage can’t satisfy. It‘s a one-way ticket to ineptitude.
There’s been a lot of talk about how Christopher Nolan snuck in some horror elements into his epic adaptation of The Odyssey. However, even before the Cyclops began to eat Ithican soldiers and Circe subjected them to magical body-horror, cinemagoers were already witnessing supernatural terror through a certain trailer that was attached to most IMAX screenings of Nolan’s film.
It turns out that this trailer was for Rob Savage’s Other Mommy, an adaptation of Bird Box author Josh Malerman’s horror novel, Incidents Around the House. With the teaser now available online and revealing that the award-winning Jessica Chastain is playing the titular antagonist (as well as her ill-fated human counterpart), not to mention the fact that the picture is being helmed by the director of hits like Host and The Boogeyman, genre fans are understandably hyped for this upcoming thriller.
That’s why I’ve decided to take a closer look at the trailer and share four things we learned from this sneak peek at Other Mommy!
4. Rob Savage is Going Back to His Supernatural Horror Roots
I know I’m in the minority when I admit that Dashcam is my favorite Rob Savage movie, but even I understand why the filmmakers’ fans have been waiting a while for the director to get back to telling more grounded paranormal stories as he did with 2020’s Host.
Other Mommy obviously isn’t a found footage movie, but moments like the poltergeist activity on the kitchen table combined with the nature of the source material, which actually features a full-on exorcism, indicate that this adaptation is more than a simple creature feature. That’s why I think Savage is once again going to borrow from the same ghostly narratives that made his debut film such a viral hit.
3. Other Mommy is a More Convincing Doppelganger in the Adaptation
Part of the horror from Malerman’s original novel came from the fact that the entity taking on the form of Bela’s (Arabella Olivia Clark) mother wasn’t very good at passing itself off as human. This resulted in several uncanny moments where other characters began to notice that there was something visibly wrong with the family and decided to keep their distance.
Savage’s film appears to be taking a different route, with the trailer showing a version of the entity that can, at least physically, imitate Chastain’s character perfectly. This change is likely the result of the filmmakers wanting to incorporate more paranoid scenes where Bela and her father, played by Jay Duplass, are confused about which Mommy is safe to interact with.
2. The Family is Also Better Off This Time Around
Incidents Around the House featured some interesting subtext about how poverty can negatively affect American family dynamics. After all, the main characters were already feeling scared and isolated before the entity emerged from Bela’s closet and began scratching at their emotional wounds. The trailer for the movie, however, depicts the family as being relatively well off before these incidents begin to occur.
I can only imagine that this part of the story was changed so that the family’s fall from grace can be even more dramatic as the mom and dad’s pasts are revealed and Bela falls further into the clutches of the demonic antagonist.
1. Jessica Chastain is Embodying Evil Dead Rise’s Alyssa Sutherland
Mothers turning against their children is one of the most disturbing horror tropes out there (just check out classics like Hereditary and Carrie if you need proof), but it takes a remarkably skilled actress to pull off such a monstrous transformation. This is especially true when both a regular, loving mother and the Other share the screen in the same film.
That’s why I appreciate how Chastain appears to be channeling another evil redhead mother that recently traumatized audiences with her performance. It’s too early to be sure, but I’m fairly confident that Chastain’s character has at least some amount of Ellie in her cinematic DNA – Ellie being the iconic deadite brought to life by Australian actress Alyssa Sutherland in 2023’s Evil Dead Rise.
Let us know in the comments if you think we missed any important details from the trailer, and don’t forget to check out Other Mommy when it hits theaters on October 9!
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