Panic on the Trans-Siberian Express!

Horror Express is a cheap but nifty, fast paced, and unpredictable slice of ’70s Euro horror. A Spain-UK co-production from 1972, the film pairs genre vets Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing in a story that begins as standard monster-on-the-loose fare, albeit in a unique location, and turns into something quite different. Lee stars as Alexander Saxton, an anthropologist who discovers a prehistoric apeman frozen in a cave in Manchuria at the turn of the 20th century. Packed into a crate, the icy creature is loaded onto  the Transiberian Express. The creature, of course, thaws out and escapes from the crate, stalking passengers aboard the train. But the apeman is far more than it appears.

Not a bad poster, but where’s the Photoshopped floating heads?

The creature has a unique way of killing. Its eyes glow red and it sucks the memories and knowledge from its victims through their eyes, blanching the pupils and leaving the brains “as smooth as a baby’s bottom” (as is revealed when Cushing’s Dr. Wells performs an autopsy — his surgical training for the Hammer Frankenstein movies must have come in handy for this sequence). This means that the apeman gets smarter with each killing and acquires new skills. After killing a thief, for instance, it can pick a lock to facilitate its escape. In an out-of-left-field twist worthy of the X-Files it’s revealed that this is not an apeman after all.

A great piece of trash entertainment, Horror Express belies its low budget with a briskly-paced and unusual story, colourful period setting, and quality acting. Cushing and Lee, teamed up so often for films for Hammer and Amicus, work beautifully together. In an interview for John Brosnan’s book The Horror People, Cushing remarked on how much he adored doing the film and the two actors’ warm offscreen friendship shines through in the amiable performances. In the last third of the film, Telly Savalas shows up and chews the scenery as a Cossack officer, considerably livening things up for his brief screen time. The film hurtles along like the titular express, and by the time we get to the literal cliffhanging ending we’ve gone from monster movie to demon possession flick to eon-spanning SF to zombie film to disaster epic. When a character near the end has a brief monologue about how they contain within them the “entire history of the earth” then you know you’ve ended up in a very different place than the beginning of the movie. For a cheap genre film, the screenplay has a streak of crazed genre-blending ambition, combining John W. Campbell’s Who Goes There and Hammer’s Nigel Kneale-scripted The Abominable Snowman in a plot that anticipates some of the storylines in Chris Carter’s The X-Files.

This being a cheap ’70s genre flick, of course there’s tat. Though the apeman is wisely kept in shadow for many scenes, there’s a couple of wonderful moments where it steps into light and looks like it’s wearing a rather hairy sweater. The glowing red eye effects are right out of a Halloween costume. Director Eugenio Martin, in the spirit of ’70s European genre filmmakers like Jess Franco, amusingly overrelies on zooms in and out. The shots of the train hurtling down the track are quite obviously a model. And yet….all this just adds to the charm of the film.

The period gothic settings of the Hammer films were hugely influential on the horror genre of that era. Horror Express clearly attempts to ape (ha!) the Hammer look and feel in its costumes and set decoration. Much like Hammer, there is an ingenious use of limited sets. Apparently there was one train car that was redressed for the various sets, something that was done seamlessly, much like Bernard Robinson did for the studio that dripped blood. The efficient use of set decoration and costuming give the film a modestly lavish look that helps disguise the stingy budget. Staging most of the film on a train helps contain costs, of course, but also adds a feeling of claustrophobia. And anyway, how many other films have used a train as a setting for horror? I can only think of the dreadful slasher film Terror Train. Strange, as it seems a natural setting for a horror flick.

To top things off, composer John Cavacas contributes a wonderful, quintessentially ’70s score. The title sequence begins with the eerie, whistled melody that is carried over into the entire soundtrack. It’s reminiscent of Morricone and Goblin, with a twang of electric guitar and exotic Russian and Chinese stylings, and adds immensely to the film.

I saw Horror Express as a nipper, about 12 or 13 years old I think, on BBC tv in the UK. Back then, of course, television was the only way outside of the cinema where you could watch movies, being pre-VHS tape. So when a horror film came on, for a young genre movie fan it was an event. Plus, my parents actually allowing me to stay up and watch it made it doubly special. At this point I’d seen hardly any Hammer films, so this was likely the first pairing of Lee and Cushing that I saw. The ape man and the red eye/white eye/bleeding eye imagery stayed with me for years after, and I ended up buying a cheap videotaped copy of the film, which had inadvertantly lapsed into public domain. So it was with a bit of trepidation as to how the film would hold up that I popped the brand new Blu Ray disc of the film into the player the other night. I’m happy to report that the film holds up, at least for those of us who are not stuffed-shirt film snobs, and that Severin’s disc is fabulous. The high def transfer is crisp and sharp, with the occasional print damage merely adding to the grindhouse feel.

All in all, it’s retro horror as comfort food, and a reminder that sometimes cheap genre cinema can be somewhat bold and enduring.