The Movie:

What happened to Thora Birch? The girl who originally starred in movies like American Beauty and Ghost World has somehow wound up in a straight to video cheapies like Train, a film that was originally intended as a remake of the Jamie Curtis vehicle Terror Train.

Like a lot of horror films that have followed in the wake of Eli Roth's Hostel, Train takes place in some remote part of Eastern Europe. A co-ed team of wrestlers spearheaded by Alex (Thora Birch - seriously, she plays a wrestler) are travelling around Europe hitting a few different wrestling tournaments that are taking place. Once night Alex and a few of her closest wrestling pals decide to skip out and hit a big rave that's going down - bad move. After a night of partying, they miss their train much to the couch's chagrin. It would seem their luck has changed, however, when a kindly woman invites them to board a different train that'll get them to where they need to go almost as quickly. What they don't realize is that this train is run by a group of underground human organ harvesters and that Alex and her team are their next crop!

So yeah, pretty little Thora Birch and her wrestling pals are now on a train with some nasty criminals who spend the rest of the movie cutting people up. The thing about organ harvesting is that you can't really keep the organs outside of a body for very long, so the bad guys have to keep a lot of their victims alive, which results in a lot of dumb gratuitous torture. The film tries to make some sort of moral statement as we learn that the organ harvesters have a plus side to them - the spoils of their efforts go to people who need them - but that hardly excuses their actions and essentially renders whatever sort of social commentary the filmmakers were trying to instill in the picture completely impotent.

The film falls victim to most of the clichés that seasoned viewers associate with the genre as of late. The party hardy tourists (in this case the wrestling team) are foolish enough to trust a sneaky European type and wind up fighting for their lives against a crew of murders much tougher and scarier than they are. Of course, the indomitable spirit that makes the good guys the good guys in the first place will come into play during the finale and a character who in real life would not have a snowball's chance in hell of defeating her captor will overcome insurmountable odds and do just that. A few unimportant supporting characters will serve as cannon fodder along the way to appease the gorehounds but there's nothing here outside of the admittedly impressive gore effects that would seem to even remotely resemble realism.

The film's production values aren't half bad, though as you'd probably guess the picture is pretty grim looking, and the movie is actually quite well shot on a technical level. There's some impressive and creative camerawork on display throughout but sadly the performances are inconsistent. If you're able to accept Thora Birch as a wrestler then her performance here isn't half bad at all but you can't really say the same about the rest of the cast, none of whom stand out in the slightest. Much of the dialogue is pretty stilted, at times laughably so, and this doesn't help the cast much at all, instead it makes a lot of already bad acting seem worse than it really is.

Ultimately the film does deliver some memorably vicious gore, but little more than that. There's really very little in the way of actual suspense or scares, just a lot of blood and guts and bad acting.

Video:

Train hits DVD in a 1.78.1 anamorphic widescreen transfer that is as grimy and dark as you'd expect given the content. There are times where the black levels aren't quite as strong as they probably should have been, however. Aside from that, color replication is fine though some scenes have been given an intentionally muted and flat look, presumably to create an atmosphere of impending doom. It's a fairly ugly looking film in many ways, it's dreary and sometimes devoid of much color, but the disc is reasonably well authored and would seem to be pretty true to the source material.