Train (2008)

The Worst Film Ever

So much average

A different way of telling a story

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

TRAIN is a one-note film with a one-note idea: somebody, somewhere said "let's make HOSTEL and set it on a train". The project was greenlight, and this movie was born, a vehicle for former Hollywood starlet Thora Birch produced by her former porn star father, Jack.And, unsurprisingly, it turns out to be pretty rubbish. This is low budget, xenophobic nonsense throughout, shot in Eastern Europe and happily ripping off HOSTEL left, right, and centre. The story goes that a group of American gymnastics students are stranded abroad and suckered into boarding a decidedly dodgy train, where the usual shenanigans arise. This is a torture porn film and nothing else, so whether you enjoy it or not depends on how much you like seeing people getting bits snipped off them at frequent intervals.The film boasts poor acting, one note characterisation, and bad direction. Thora Birch is just about adequate as the heroine, but the rest of the cast aren't up to much - apart from Gideon Emery perhaps, as the only distinctive one of the group (he's playing a gay, dope-smoking elder who hooks up with the rest). The villainous motivations are ludicrous, and the film really drags despite the plentiful action and many death sequences. I was also surprised at the sheer number of plot holes and goofs along the way, which indicates it was probably written and rushed out in a hurry to cash in on the success of the (thankfully) short-lived "torture porn" genre. In any case, it's a dog of a film.

A group of Americans (many are wrestlers) travel through Eastern Europe by train. As they become abducted and killed we learn that this is part of an organ harvesting ring. Why torture the victims before hand? Makes little sense. How about that a team of wrestlers aren't able to defend themselves? Makes less sense. What you do get is gory live organ removal, eye removal, broken neck, male necrophilia sodomy (yes you read that right), a girl beaten, impaled under the chin, dragged and then taken by a group of soldiers to be gang raped (and presumably killed), ripped out nipple rings, throat slicing, an axe mercy killing and cast of indifferent to homicidal Europeans hunting some perpetually victimized young people. Some may read this description and find the thought of watching people beaten, dis-em bowled, crushed, raped and murdered to be a great time. I don't want to meet you. This isn't even on par with Hostel which managed at least some dark humor and a cathartic bit of revenge. This is just ugly and hopefully the last gasp of a tired horror subgenre.

Oh, how I love the way the almighty good old US of A assumes that literally every single human being from Eastern Europe is a psychopathic butcher with bad personal hygiene, hideous scars all over and a fetish for amateur surgery. Bunch of American college students – athletes participating in an international tournament – miss their reserved train and thus have to travel to Ukraine in an alternative and deteriorating old train that is of course chock full of sadist and deeply unpleasant Eastern Europeans whose hobby is torturing foreigners. Wow, that is so original! No wait, I'm mistaken … it's actually the most dull, derivative and exaggeratedly overdone concept of the past ten years. I read here in the trivia section that "Train" was initially supposed to become a remake of "Terror Train"; a rather insignificant and almost entirely forgotten early 80's slasher starring scream queen Jamie Lee Curtis. So ironically enough, instead of a lousy and totally redundant remake, the film became a lousy and totally redundant clone of "Hostel" and approximately two dozen of other so-called torture porn flicks. But hey, the good news for fans of this particular sub genre of horror is that "Train" is definitely worth a rent if you need to still your hunger for nauseating gore and gratuitous bloodshed. The movie opens already with grisly images of a cadaver being skinned from head to toes and subsequently cut open, and there's plenty of more, including impalement, bludgeoning, throat slicing, meat-hooking, woman beating, raping, axe-wielding, head crushing and disembowelment. All this, of course, without any type of anesthetics and/or sterilized medical equipment! Writer/director Gideon Raff loves to show everything in great detail so be advised that "Train" is a really disgusting and ghastly flick. Thora Birch is too good of an actress to star in flicks like these, but luckily she's there, as the rest of the cast is bland and the maniacs are solely selected on their menacing grimaces.

Okay this movie certainly won't win any awards or make Thora Birch a star again, but this movie is quite fun and okay, although the premise is unbelievably stupid and way too far fetched. This is one of the few slasher movies that have came out in recent years that isn't a remake, although this is what started out as a remake to 1980's Jamie Lee Curtis slasher "Terror Train" kinda morphed into it's own movie.The plot = A group of teens (the usual 20-30 something cast), who are on the school wrestling team, miss they're train to Odessa, after a local woman helps them by leading them to another train that's heading to the same location, as soon as they board the train they started getting picked off one by one, by a mad doctor whose using them are live organ donors.Come on I mean okay maybe internal organs can be used, but how can tongues and penises be used again, that is just stupid, and the fact that everyone else on the train just sits there doing nothing while these teens are being chased and hacked to pieces extreme stupidness of the lead characters and flaws in the script that cause bizarre situations, I mean talk about leave your brain at the door. This just feels like Hostel part 3 and has absolutely no intelligence whatsoever to it, but it does have some great gore and chilling death scenes.All in all, I gave this movie a 4 because of the gore and great death scenes, other than that this movie has nothing going for it, and it's also sad to see someone as talented as Thora Birch just going through the motions in this it seems as though she has given up.