Director – Philippe Gagnon, Screenplay – Ian Carpenter & Aaron Martin, Based on the Film Terror Train (1980) Written by T.Y. Drake, Producers – Kaleigh Kavanagh & Graham Ludlow, Photography – Daniel Villeneuve, Music – Mario Sevigny, Visual Effects – A.A. Studios (Supervisor – Marc Hall), Makeup Effects – Erik Gosselin. Production Company – Incendo/Crave.
Cast
Robyn Alomar (Alana), Nadine Bhabha (Sadie), Tim Rozon (The Magician), Matias Garrido (Doc), Mary Walsh (Carne), Corteon Moore (Mo), Dakota Jamal Wellman (The Prez), Emma Elle Paterson (Mitchy), Kenny Wong (Jackson), Tori Barban (Merry), Romy Weltman (Pet), Alexandre Bacon (Ed), Noah Parker (Kenny)
Plot
Med student Alana agrees to participate in a prank arranged by Doc where the nerdish Kenny is lured into a room, thinking he is going to sleep with her – only for him to find a corpse stolen from the morgue awaiting him in bed. This causes Kenny to snap and have to be placed in an institution. Three years later, the students hold a Halloween costume party aboard a cross-country train. As the trip gets underway, someone on board begins killing the students who were involved in the prank played on Kenny.
Terror Train (1980) was a classic of the Slasher Film. A Canadian production that came out early on into the slasher fad, it starred the quintessential slasher heroine Jamie Lee Curtis as the Final Girl being stalked during a New Year’s Eve party held aboard a train. Almost all of the significant films of that era have undergone remakes since the mid-2000s and this time it is Terror Train’s turn. The remake was shot at the same time as a sequel Terror Train 2 (2022), featuring the same production crew and cast.
Like the original Terror Train, the remake is a Canadian production. The film was shot in Quebec, the French-speaking section of Canada, as was the original. Director Philippe Gagnon is mostly known for work in Canadian-shot tv movies and mini-series, although did previously direct In a Galaxy Near You 2 (1999), the film spinoff of a French-language Star Trek spoof tv series, and the werewolf film The Hair of the Beast (2010).
In the 2020s, one has become used to remakes and revivals of familiar intellectual property where the characters from the original are revisited with a greater spectrum of diversity – where key roles are now played by a broader range of ethnic faces, attention paid to the inclusion of LGBT characters and the like. I often find some of this grating in the way that such works make a big, loudly announced point of replacing an original with the new demographic, while making sure to tick off all the boxes so that everybody is included, but frequently distorting the story in order to do so. Terror Train 2022 is one of the worst examples of this.
In the case of Terror Train 2022, this has gone beyond just redressing a disparity of faces that have not been widely included before into becoming an ideological treatise that finds every opportunity to make such inclusivity points and moreover have characters lecture the audience about it. The original was a simple uncomplicated slasher film; by contrast, the remake has been transformed into a preachy high-handed work of moralism that has stolen the bones of a classic slasher film. It almost gets as bad as the Black Christmas (2019) remake did. I do need to make the point here that I have no issue with and support the position of greater inclusion; on the other hand, I have zero interest in people hectoring me about it. As with Black Christmas, I have no support for the ransacking of the past and turning older works into puritanical moral lectures.
(l to r) Nadine Bhabha, Robyn Alomar and Tim Rozon face the killer the trainThe masked killer
It becomes apparent that the new Terror Train is determined to replace the characters in the original with more progressive ones. Most notedly, Jamie Lee Curtis has been replaced with African-American actress Robyn Alomar; Carney the old timer conductor is replaced by an aging woman conductor, while in the sequel the equivalent role of Carney is replaced by gender neutral actor Ess Hodlmoser. When you’re replacing someone in a part who has the genre stature of Jamie Lee Curtis, they better bring something more to the role than simply being a different ethnicity, but beyond this simple point Robyn Alomar is just a bland and anonymous face.
Characters lecture the audience: “Now, our fraternity is committed to respect and inclusion” and “Make sure to receive consent when engaging in any sexual activities.” One of the guys lightly teases conductor Nadine Bhabha and is severely reprimanded (far in excess of anything he actually says) and is told “How about you treat her like a human being and not a piece of meat and let her do her job? What did you think she would do – fuck you after you humiliated her?” One girl even redresses the killer “You don’t have consent to grab me!” On the other side of the coin is Matias Corrido as Doc, who is recast as an obnoxious jock and a former fraternity head who comes out with lines like “You know, if I said half the shit that you say about me about women, I’d be cancelled” and reminisces about “Back when frats were actually fun, not uptight snowflake fests.” What we are watching is not a slasher film but a morality lecture in the guise of a horror film.
The remake duplicates the screenplay of the original Terror Train fairly closely on most points. There is the odd updating – now the prank played on Kenny in the opening scenes is filmed by the other students on their phones. (Although if such was uploaded or distributed, you cannot help but wonder why the students responsible weren’t entirely suspended from college, least of all heroine Robyn Alomar for her central participation).
The character of The Magician (now played by Tim Rozon) is made more prominent and there is the suggestion of attraction between he and Robyn Alomar and even that he might be the killer. The most significant change however comes to the ending where it is no longer Kenny who is the killer but [PLOT SPOILERS] a new change that introduces Kenny’s mother, where such cannot help but seem reminiscent of the end of Friday the 13th (1980).
