Night Train DVD Review
Night Train DVD Review
Dangers on a Train.
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I guess nobody in the world knows about Pandora's box. Or Pinhead's. In Night Train, three thick strangers on a train all look inside the widows of a mysterious, impenetrable wooden puzzle box that's in the clutches of a suddenly deceased passenger, and their fates are sealed. They know this, but refuse to believe it. They think they can beat the Satanic system.
On a cold, snowy Christmas Eve, the late train, The Nightingale departing from Fall Brook Station, only has a few passengers. There's the mysterious Mr. Cairo (Jo Marr) protecting his precious object d'art; composed medical student Chloe (Leelee Sobieski), who's on a journey home to visit her parents; lonely, alcoholic traveling salesman Pete (Steve Zahn); a pair of game-playing Japanese businessmen (Takatsuna Mukai, Togo Igawa); the obviously cross-dressing Mrs. Froy (Richard O'Brien), and her pampered Pomeranian "Poochie". Along for the ride are the elder conductor Miles (Danny Glover), and the young porter Walter (Harry Anichkin).
When Mr. Cairo dies en route, detectives get involved, but mostly Night Train is about the trio of would-be box-thieves: the student, the salesman and the conductor. Planning on splitting their ill-gotten goods three ways, each decides that two ways is better and one of them starts trying to play both sides of the fence. Meanwhile, the evil which resides inside the container permeates the train from front-cab to end-caboose. A few decent death scenes and a gory corpse dismemberment ensue.
A cross between The Maltese Falcon, a Simple Plan and a sparser-cast Murder on the Orient Express, Night Train has a lot going for it plot-wise — it is not, however, anything like Midnight Meat Train. So, horror fans proceed with that warning. In fact, everyone should proceed with caution when opening this DVD box. I'm not exactly saying you shouldn't see Night Train, but afterward I was all… uh, bored.
This direct-to-disc feature has a nice reteaming of Sobieski and Zahn (they first appeared together in the 2001 horror film Joyride), the always-welcome Glover, a great, confined setting (just a few recommendations: Strangers on a Train, The Cassandra Crossing, Murder on the Orient Express, Terror Train, The Darjeeling Limited, and Transsiberian), nice colors and set dressing (glowing holiday lights against dark, frost-fogged windows), an atmospheric backdrop, unobtrusive music and so on… However, its slow pacing and utter predictability work too hard against Night Train to keep it on track. It would have been much better as a one-hour thriller for TV, or a 45-minute peg in a cinematic anthology.
The DVD has some rather lazily tossed together featurettes, which include a look at how the train sets (no, the other other kind of train set) were constructed, and then a very poorly edited (more like hacked), quite static Q&A with the actors, all simply saying how wonderful it was to work on this movie. Yawn.
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Reviewed by Staci Layne Wilson