Terror Train (1980)★★★★☆

This isn’t the first (or even the second) horror movie I’ve watched that takes place on a train, but it might be the most fun. Despite the standard “mean prank gone horribly wrong” revenge trope, this movie is campy 80s horror fun, Jamie Lee Curtis included.

This movie was so fun that despite all the murder, I still kind of want to go on a train party? A party train? Conceptually, trains are such a neat setting for stories. Trains running in endless loops around the world. Trains stopped in the middle of the woods late at night. Trains where everyone conspires to murder a passenger and cover it up. Trains where Keanu Reeves is taller! There’s something about the limited escape options – and generally limited intruder options – that gives trains their own personality and ambience as a setting.

There are a couple places where the story seems to drag on just slightly too long, and the killer reveal came just slightly too late (and after it became incredibly obvious), but otherwise I genuinely enjoyed watching this film.

(Spoilers ahead) I do think the idea of the killer changing into the next victim’s costume before anyone realizes they’re dead is awesome! And I feel like in 1980, the “killer hiding disguised among us” trope wasn’t as ubiquitous – The Thing came out a couple of years later. So it feels kind of original?

I also love that they’re just razzing David Copperfield the whole time, and he’s kind of razzing them back (look, I was ready to rate this 3 stars before “can anybody make him disappear?”). And of course Jamie Lee Curtis was a badass. …although, the eventual climactic vindication really had less to do with her badassery and more to do with the antagonist’s…PTSD?

But oh wow did I love the satisfying THUNK at the end.