BA_Harrison Trashy mid-'80s horror anthology Night Train To Terror opens with a hilarious musical number aboard a steam train, as a truly terrible pop/rock band and their 'rejects from Fame' dancers party their way to Las Vegas; meanwhile, in another carriage, God (Ferdy Mayne) and Satan (Tony Giorgio) discuss the merits of good and evil, illustrating their points with a trio of macabre stories.With each of these tales comprising of clumsily butchered and messily re-edited footage from three full-length films, plus a few added special effects to pep things up a bit, the results are disjointed and often incoherent, but the juicy gore and a fair amount of female nudity ensures that they still prove mindlessly entertaining.Story number one, The Case of Harry Billings, is a hotchpotch of random scenes from unfinished 1981 movie Scream Your Head Off. It stars John Phillip Law as a man who finds himself a patient at a sanatorium where the doctors chop up beautiful women and sell the body parts to medical schools. Under hypnosis, Harry is forced to lure a series of babes to the hospital, but eventually comes to his senses and tries to escape. With lots of big breasted naked women, gory severed limbs, and a cool decapitation, this segment is a lot of fun despite the narrative being all over the place.After some more terrible music and poorly choreographed dance moves from the young revellers, it's on with episode number two, The Case of Gretta Connors, which sees musician/porn star Gretta (Merideth Haze) falling for graduate student Glenn (Rick Barnes), much to the annoyance of her manager George Youngmeyer (J. Martin Sellers). To try and get even with the couple, George forces them to join a 'death club' (the original film used for this part was called Death Wish Club), where participants take their chances with a series of potentially fatal games. Shonky stop-motion animation, an exploding face, an electrocution that results in a melted head, and yet more nudity keeps boredom at bay.After another chance to marvel at the sheer awfulness of the band and their troupe - this time with break-dancing - it's onto the final story, The Case of Claire Hansen, which uses footage from 1980 Omen-inspired horror Cataclysm. Faith Clift plays surgeon Claire, who is chosen to defeat the devil's emissary Mr. Olivier (Robert Bristol) by cutting out his heart and placing it in a wooden box fashioned from Christ's cross. Once again, the plot is chaotic, with Cameron Mitchell's police officer adding very little, but with the cloven-hoofed Mr. Olivier, more poorly executed stop-motion (including a spider demon that drags a monk to Hell), and some splattery surgery, this is just as much fun as the other two tales.Having examined all three cases, God and Satan sit tight as the train crashes, at which point the band and the dancers are judged and sent to either heaven or hell. It doesn't make much sense, but that's all part of the fun.6/10.

Michael_Elliott Night Train to Terror (1985) * 1/2 (out of 4)God and Satan are on board a train where a rock band is playing. The two talk about who is respected more and then we see three separate stories. The first story deals with a man who feels guilty over a drunk driving death that he caused. He finds himself involved in a strange experiment. The second story deals with a medical student who falls in love with a beautiful woman and gets drawn into a strange world of monsters. The final story has a detective (Cameron Mitchell) investigating a murder that leads to a Satanic playboy with special powers.NIGHT TRAIN TO TERROR is a really, really bizarre little movie with an even more bizarre behind-the-scenes story. The only new footage here are the scenes dealing with the rock band and God and Satan. Everything else is footage taken from three completely different movies. What's so strange is that all three of those movies are available to view in their complete form so it's kind of pointless watching them chopped up to fit 20-30 minute segments.The biggest problem with this movie is that all three stories are completely confusing and they never make too much sense. THere are so many logical issues with each of the three stories and it's easy to see why because all of them are missing over a hours worth of footage. To say that this film was a complete hack job would be fair and it's also fair to say that the studio was just trying to make some cash out of the previous films that I'm guessing they already owed. Why not cut them down, add a wrap-around story and try to pass it off as something new?Whatever their reasons were, it's funny to think that NIGHT TRAIN TO TERROR has remained easy to find over the years while the three other complete films (MARILYN ALIVE AND BEHIND BARS, THE DARK SIDE TO LOVE and CATACLYSM) aren't as easy to track down, although THE DARK SIDE OF LOVE was released as a bonus feature for the Blu-ray release of NIGHT TRAIN TO TERROR.As it stands, this is a pretty hard film to judge simply because of the editing process. The end result is quite poor and it's hard to be entertained by NIGHT TRAIN TO TERROR simply because the stories are so bad as they are presented here. To really judge them you'd need to see the complete films. As it stands, NIGHT TRAIN TO TERROR is pretty bad but the backstory is much more interesting.

Scarecrow-88 Malarkey from cobbled footage of three films (the first discarded and unfinished but actually my favorite of the three!) is continuity hell, truly looking like a piecemeal project, quite the editing botch-job. God and Satan debate over who gets the souls of the characters contained in three separate tales. The night train of the title features rejects from Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo doing a song-and-breakdance while the Great Debate occurs in a different compartment. The first deals with poor John Philip Law seemingly condemned to a rather insignificant slasher film set in an asylum as Richard Moll, of all people, is a henchman with an active participation in severing the body parts of female victims Law picks up in bars (Law is the unfortunate "patient" placed under hypnosis in the institution, ordered to do the bidding of the administrator who runs the place!), with the bits and pieces sold black market! This has lots of naked victims strapped and bound to hospital gurneys and a surprising amount of bloodletting. It is horrendously edited, though, and barely makes sense beyond the initial premise. The second film is just a laughable "death game" competition where a select group participate in a series of challenges where the end result for the unlucky loser is a rather unpleasant demise (the electric shock gag had me in ribbons, not to mention, the dangerous fly the size of a man's hand; the final game has the unfortunate loser have a 250 pound dumbbell dropped on their head, swinging around with the rope steadily cut by a saw). Again, this one has excerpts from another movie thrown together and barely cohesive (well, not cohesive at all), but the girl that is the object of the affections of her "handler" and a boyfriend that meets her while she's shagging a college pal in a dorm gets full frontal and out of her clothes so it has that going for it. The third tale is a dull demonic affair where Satan himself (I thought we had already established who that is, but I digress…), in the guise of the same young Teen Idol looks of a devious chap named Olivier over several wars (as a Nazi, he is recognized by a Jewish concentration camp survivor) who could have been Damien from the Omen movies as a twenty-something. Claymation effects involving demons are applied (considered by many to be hilariously lame), including a sequence where minions from hell reach for the heroine who will be chosen to do battle against God's greatest adversary. Richard Moll is the heroine's atheist hubby, a media figure with a publication on how "God is dead", and whose own soul is in jeopardy. Her hack job supposedly to Satan on an operating table is pure Grand Guignol.The conversations between God and Satan on the train, following (or just before) the jiving kids and their singing for the camera directly at us further add a thick layer of Velveeta to the already rubbish stitch-job anthology strung together with bailey wire, duck tape, and Elmer's glue. Not without its moments, but perhaps the three movies should have been left well enough alone (maybe, though, without Night Train they never would have seen the light of day or had been remotely provided the platform or promotion given here). I imagine this would make the ideal double header with A Night to Dismember. The makeup effects (a head explodes blood all over a girl he's making out with thanks to the runaway fly; another body gradually deteriorates during an electric shock) are rather low budget misfires, practical effects quite pitifully performed. There's even an unfortunate train miniature substituting the real thing. For lovers of rancid cinema.

Woodyanders This is what you get when three unrelated movies are crudely patched together to form an outrageously tacky'n'trashy horror anthology with one wonderfully awful and idiotic wrap-around section based aboard a speeding train populated by singing and dancing young folks bouncing all over the place while God (smoothly played by Ferdy Mayne sporting a snowy white beard and hair) and Satan (a nicely oily portrayal by Tony Giorgio) debate about the fates of three souls in an adjacent compartment. The messy individual stories deal with a sinister clinic that traffics in human body parts, a young man who falls for a lovely lass who's involved with a creepy death-obsessed club that participates in inventive variants on Russian roulette, and a female doctor and a feisty Jewish holocaust survivor (a jittery Marc Lawrence) who are both terrorized by the son of the Devil. Man, does this uproariously atrocious abomination cover all the essential pleasingly lousy'n'lurid Grade Z cinema bases: Tacky (far from) special effects (the cruddy stop-motion claymation monsters in the last vignette in particular are a sidesplitting sight to behold), wonky continuity, faded names Cameron Mitchell and John Phillip Law desperately trolling for a paycheck, plentiful tasty gratuitous distaff nudity, a seriously loopy and nonsensical script by Philip Yordan, more spastic break dancing than a dozen 1980's rap music videos, cheesy gore, a hapless narrator working serious overtime to give the disjointed tales a slight semblance of coherence, some clumsily staged martial arts, and an insidiously catchy'n'gnarly theme song that once heard is downright impossible to forget. As an added plus, Richard Moll appears in two segments with a full head of hair. A hilariously horrendous hoot and a half!