In the United States, American International Pictures broke up their run of stand-alone Edgar Allan Poe adaptations with Tales of Terror (1962), while Italy's Mario Bava served up the terror triptych Black Sabbath (1964) and Japan experimented with the format in Kwaidan (1964), a clutch of elegantly mounted ghost stories. The true renaissance of horror anthology films would occur back in the United Kingdom, albeit at the hands of a pair of Yankee expatriates; under the banner of their Amicus Productions, native New Yorkers Max Rosenberg and Milton J. Subotsky made the anthology horror movie a true going concern with Dr. Terror's House of Horrors (1965), bracketing their sundry tales of terror with the framing device of strangers having their fortunes read aboard a speeding train.
Amicus exhausted the format within a few short years, adding to their resume the magazine morbidity of Torture Garden (1967), The House That Dripped Blood (1970), Asylum (1972), Tales from the Crypt (1972), The Vault of Horror (1973), and From Beyond the Grave (1973), a release catalog that pressed into common cause a mercenary hodgepodge of aging Hollywood A-listers (Jack Palance, Burgess Meredith, Barbara Parkins, Joan Collins), jobbing British actors (Denholm Elliot, David Warner, Jon Pertwee, Joss Ackland), and time-tested fright film headliners (Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, Ingrid Pitt). In the United States, TV producer Dan Curtis, fresh from the long run of his Gothic daytime melodrama Dark Shadows, sampled the anthology format with Trilogy of Terror (1975) and Dead of Night (1977) but by mid-decade - with The Exorcist (1973), Jaws (1975), and The Omen (1976) having legitimized matinee fare and driven up production costs - the anthology format went the way of the Poverty Row western.
With drive-ins and second-run grindhouses shuttering through the Eighties, the last bastion for low budget and independent exploitation fare became the home video market. During the VHS boom, horror movie fans who had glutted themselves on recent releases often turned to the dusty slipcases lining the lowest shelves of the sci-fi/horror section of their local video stores. The twin gods of boredom and desperation were surely to thank for driving renters to the unprepossessing likes of Alien Zone (aka The House of the Dead, 1978), an economy anthology horror film shot on location in Oklahoma and featuring former Bewitched star Bernard Fox and forgotten Honey West leading man Jon Ericson; The Monster Club (1981), starring a slumming Vincent Price in a clutch of stories adapted from the writings of R. Chetwynd Hayes; and Night Train to Terror (1985), a fright film three-fer that borrowed a trick from Dr. Terror's House of Horrors by setting its action aboard an express train bound for a preordained disaster.
The anthology format was by the mid-Eighties recipient of a much-needed boost with the success of the George A. Romero-Stephen King collaboration Creepshow (1982), a collection of five shocking stories in EC Comics mode that spawned no small number of chaptered copycats, among them Nightmares (1983), Screamtime (1986), Deadtime Stories (1987), Freakshow (1989), and even such big ticket attempts as Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983) and Stephen King's Cat's Eye (1985). Produced with a painfully obvious lack of wherewithal but boasting the authorial tag of "Academy Award-winner" Philip Yordan, Night Train to Terror enjoyed a brief theatrical distribution by Visto International, Inc. before being dumped - without fanfare--onto VHS tape. Anyone who took a chance on Night Train to Terror as a Prism SP or Parade EP-mode video tape (a staple of sell-through bargain VHS tape bins for years) was rewarded with a head-scratching viewing experience on par with a fever dream fugue.
Night Train to Terror begins on the rails with a metaphysical club car sit-down between God (Ferdy Mayne, from Roman Polanski's The Fearless Vampire Killers [1967]) and his fallen angel (Tony Giorgio, often cast as mobsters in such films as The Godfather [1972], Magnum Force [1973], and Capone [1975]) as a New Wave band who have come aboard following the breakdown of their tour bus jams in an adjoining carriage. With the train doomed to derail, the Lord and Lucifer haggle for the souls of not only the musicians (among them, Philip Yordan's son Bryon) but three recently deceased individuals whose life stories are replayed through the proscenium of the train window. In "The Case of Harry Billings," John Phillip Law plays a luckless widower manipulated into supplying victims for the spare body parts black market; in "The Case of Gretta Connors," a carnival vendor turned porn star (Merideth Haze) pits her producer husband (J. Martin Sellers) against her fratboy lover (Rick Barnes) during visits to an exclusive suicide club; and in "The Case of Claire Hansen," a surgeon (Faith Clift, Mrs. Phillip Yordan) opposes Satan's emissary (Robert Bristol) on earth with a peripheral assist from a city detective (Cameron Mitchell) and a Holocaust survivor (Marc Lawrence).
All of which sounds great on paper. As Night Train to Terror unfolds, however, things simply do not add up. Plot lines are muddied into incomprehensibility, ostensible principal characters fade into the periphery while secondary and tertiary characters take focus, shots fail to match or even to cut together in anything like a proper narrative structure, and all the while that damned New Wave band keeps performing their one song ad nauseam while stop-motion monsters pop up at intervals to tear characters apart or drag them into Hell. Toeing the fine line between audacious and stupid, Night Train to Terror turns out to have been constructed from three then-unfinished low budget features: Cataclysm, a mid-70s disaster flick retooled post-The Omen as a Satanic potboiler (and subsequently released as a standalone feature titled The Nightmare Never Ends); Greta (1983), in which the "Death Wish Club" angle is greatly reduced in significance; and Harry (1982), which despite never having been completed was later issued on VHS tape by Scimitar as Scream Your Head Off, amounting to little more than a loosely connected setpieces in search of a tangible plot.
Tying all of these disparate elements together is Philip Yordan (1914-2013), a law school dropout who came to Hollywood during the Depression to work as a screenwriter for Monogram Pictures. Yordan's abiding claim to fame is for taking sole credit for work he either assigned to other writers (among them, William Castle) or as a well-paid "front" for such blacklisted scribes as Ben Maddow and Bernard Gordon. (Yordan's only Oscar win was for a movie he never worked on, Broken Lance, a 1954 western remake of Yordan and Joseph L. Mankiewicz's earlier House of Strangers [1949]; Mankiewicz rewrote Yordan's original story for House of Strangers but when forced by arbitration to share screenplay credit with Yordan had his name removed from the finished film - thus, when the story materials were dusted off for Broken Lance, Yordan was the only writer credited and sole recipient of the award for Best Original Story.) After a tenure in Spain with producer Samuel Bronston, Yordan relocated to Utah, where he wrote ultra-low budget films about Bigfoot and the Mormon church in conjunction with local theatre and film professionals, many of whom pop up in the cast and crew of Night Train to Terror -- among them Charles Moll, later Richard Moll, the chrome-domed Bull Shannon of NBC's long-running sitcom Night Court.
The presence of such once-promising talents as Cameron Mitchell (who seems to have been paid for his appearance in cigarettes), John Phillip Law (still as fit as he was in his Danger: Diabolik/Barbarella days nearly twenty years earlier), and pockmarked Marc Lawrence (a reliable Hollywood ethnic heavy, and costar of the ostensibly Yordan-scripted Dillinger) in two roles (in the same story!) adds an unexpected layer of poignancy to the Psychotronic slumgullion that is Night Train to Terror; these actors all deserved better, and at least Lawrence enjoyed fleeting rediscovery by Quentin Tarantino and small roles in Four Rooms (1995) and From Dusk to Dawn (1996) - as well as in Jim McBride's The Big Easy (1987) and Lasse Hallström's The Shipping News (2001) - but it would be a lie to say the movie is not goofily entertaining. Laced throughout its running time with unabashed female frontal nudity and just crazy enough to work, the film is an undeniable midnight cult charmer that - like Ed Wood's Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959) or Claudio Fragasso's Troll 2 (1990) - will either make the party or kill it cold.
By Richard Harland Smith
Sources
Backstory 2: Interviews with Screenwriters of the 1940s and 1950s by Patrick McGilligan (University of California Press, 1997)
Historical Dictionary of Crime Films by Geoff Mayer (Scarecrow Press, 2013)
The Video Watchdog Book by Tim Lucas (Video Watchdog, 1992)
Review of Night Train to Terror by John Charles (Video Watchdog no. 52, 1999)
Review of Night Train to Terror by John Charles (Video Watchdog no. 179, 2015)
"Watchdog News" by Tim Lucas (Video Watchdog no. 58, 2000)
