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.
Movies
‘Boorman and the Devil’ Documentary Trailer Chronicles Complicated Relationship with ‘Exorcist II’
Critically acclaimed documentary Boorman and the Devil chronicles how one of the world’s greatest filmmakers made one of the most hated movies ever: Exorcist II: The Heretic. A new trailer highlighting some of the troubled production woes has arrived.
Boorman and the Devil opens at The Quad in NYC on August 28 before opening wider in various cities on September 4, including: Los Angeles, Columbus, Houston, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Seattle and more.
After the success of Point Blank and Deliverance, Warner Brothers offered John Boorman the opportunity of a lifetime: the chance to direct a sequel to their smash hit, The Exorcist. The result was one of the biggest disasters in movie history. A critical and financial failure that not only changed how Hollywood did business, but nearly ended Boorman’s filmmaking career… but to be an artist is to be a risk-taker.
Now, John Boorman, Linda Blair, Louise Fletcher, Karyn Kusama, Joe Dante, Mike Flanagan, and more reflect back on the ambition of the film, the artistry and craft, and the value of big creative swings.
“I am beyond thrilled that Yellow Veil has come on board to help us share this story with a larger audience,” said director David Kittredge. “Like myself and the rest of our team, they’re huge cinema-lovers. It’s so exciting that a film which is not only a love letter to John Boorman, but also to ambitious filmmaking, will be handled by people who share the same passions that our team shares.”
“I first saw the film at an early festival screening and the post-screening buzz was just electric. Everyone was loving Boorman and the Devil,” added Yellow Veil co-founder Justin Timms. “To be able to team up with David and the filmmaking team on this release is incredibly exciting, and we can’t wait to spread that post-screening electricity with audiences across the country.”
Boorman and the Devil is produced by Kittredge’s Triple Fire Productions, Travis Stevens (Jodorowsky’s Dune, Starry Eyes) of Snowfort Pictures, and Jim Fall (The Lizzie McGuire Movie), with Alan Koenigsberg of Milton Ventures Media serving as co-producer.
Daniel Kurland wrote in his review, “Boorman and the Devil goes above and beyond to be the definitive text on Exorcist II. This documentary will delight horror and Exorcist fans alike, but it also provides incredible insight for anyone who is just marginally interested in film production.”