Director/Screenplay – Gideon Raff, Producers – Boaz Davidson, Danny Lerner & Les Weldon, Photography – Martina Radwan, Music – Michael Wandmacher, Visual Effects – Worldwide FX (Supervisor – Stanislav Dragiev), Special Effects Supervisor – Ivo Jivkov, Production Design – Carlos Da Silva. Production Company – Nu Image.
Cast
Thora Birch (Alex), Gideon Emery (Willy), Derek Magyar (Todd Pattison), Gloria Votsis (Claire), Kavan Reece (Sheldon), Todd Jensen (Coach Harris), Vladimir Vladimirov (Vlad), Valentin Ganev (Conductor Vasyl), Koina Ruseva (Dr Velislava), Ivan Barnev (Gregor), Nikolay Mutafchiev (Vasily), Miroslav Emilov (Ishtav)
Plot
An American wrestling team are in Ukraine for a competition. Several of the team members sneak out of the hotel at night to go partying but end up being late back and missing the train on to Odessa the next morning. An angry Coach Harris is waiting and gets them on the next train. As they settle in for the journey and continue fooling around, members of the group start to disappear. It is then they discover that the train operates as an organ harvesting operation where it is intended that they be slaughtered for their organs.
Nu Image was a company formed in 1992 by producers Boaz Davidson and brothers Avi and Danny Lerner in the aftermath of the collapse of Cannon Films. Under the Nu Image label, the company put out an assortment of medium budget action and monster movies for video release. In 2001, Nu Image created Millennium Pictures which began to specialise in taking existing properties such as the Conan the Barbarian, Rambo, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Hellboy series, among others, and either making more entries or conducting remakes. Nu Image and Millennium merged around 2010.
Like Davidson and the Lerners, as well as Golan and Globus, Gideon Raff is an Israeli director. He first appeared with the psychological thriller The Killing Floor (2007) and Train was his second film. He has done assorted other work only in tv. His greatest distinction was as creator of the Israeli tv series Prisoners of War (2010-2), which was remade in the US as the hit series Homeland (2011-20) with Raff imported as an executive producer.
Train is a blatant copy of Hostel (2005). Hostel had a group of backpackers travel to a hostel in the former Soviet republic of Slovakia where they are imprisoned by a secret organisation that offers torture to paying customers. By contrast, Train features a group of students in the former Soviet republic of Ukraine who end up boarding a train where they are imprisoned and tortured by a secret organisation for illicit organ transplants. Both films land square in the midst of the late 2000s Torture Porn cycle and push gore and torture to extremes.
Gideon Emery and Thora Birch aboard the train
Train copies the basics of Hostel as much as it can get away without outrightly violating copyright, while pushing the gore and splatter to even greater extremes. The film opens with a naked body tied to a table and being sliced along the sides. Gloria Votsis gets a hook impaled through her chin and dragged away. We get the suggestion of an eyeball being plucked out and, it is hard to see, what looks like a dick being cut off – although what happens here is merely suggested. An eviscerated body lies on full display in the back of the carriage. Kavan Reece has his chest cut open and organs removed. It was sufficiently nasty and gore-drenched that the film was released cut and then later to dvd in an uncut version (the copy that is viewed here).
Train is a film that seems to have been made solely to deliver nastiness. The set-up leaves some questions about the basic plausibility. Like what is the purpose of the train? Does it regularly set out with people who need transplants aboard in the hope that they might pick up some unsuspecting tourists who might just be a match organ-wise? It seems a very random way of going about finding organ matches. Or have the party been deliberately lured there? It is hard to see how.
The other amusing thing that both Hostel and Train bring out is just what a racist outlook against East Europeans both films hold. The Ukrainian peoples here are depicted as filthy, degenerate, bestial and, when it comes to Vladimir Vladimirov, almost subhuman. All are shown as utterly corrupt and, like Hostel, Ukraine is seen as a country where law and order seems to have fallen off the cliff altogether. It is a caricature that you can’t call anything except a racist one. The other thing is that Bulgaria, where Nu Image’s studios are located and the film was shot, is only 600 miles away from Ukraine so there is no real excuse for not knowing anything about the people, given that they are almost next door. The only real explanation is that the filmmakers prefer grotesque ethnic caricatures to informed reality. The other amusing thing to contrast is the portrait of the utterly corrupt, degenerate Ukrainians we have in the film and just how much Ukraine has pivoted in the public consciousness to be a bastion of democracy following the Russian invasion of 2022.
