Macabre…ish Horror Review: Train

 

 

Train, 2008/ 1 hr 34 min

 

 

College athletes board a train in Eastern Europe, on their way to their wrestling championship. After a tough match, they go out to a club to celebrate, a suggestion made by a local. The next morning they miss their train.

 

The coach (Todd Jensen) hangs back to catch another train with the stragglers and once on the train, their passports are collected and burned.

 

A doctor (Koyna Ruseva) who helped explain the weird train procedure, once on the train, she seduces the coach and drugs him. He wakes up screaming in a different train car/torture chamber, having his abdominal cavity stitched up. His tongue is cut out to muffle his screams.

 

The four athletes are up with the assistant coach playing truth or dare. Todd (Derek Magyar) is dared to run the length of the train in his underwear and he’s skewered by a worker, strung up and has, his spinal cord severed and his eyes plucked out.

 

The next morning, the remaining students search for the coach and Todd. While spying on a woman showering, Sheldon (Kavan Reece) is beaten, urinated on, then dragged to the torture car. His genitalia are presented to a man at a window, once approved, they are sheared off and Sheldon is stitched up. All without anesthesia.

 

When Claire (Gloria Votsis) finds the burnt remnants of passports, she is hooked by the mouth, by the conductor (Valentin Galev) and dragged toward the chamber with the help of Vlad (Vladimir Vladimirov), on top of the train.

 

Meanwhile, Willy (Gideon Emery) and Alex (Thora Birch) find Todd, on a crude life support on a table. Sheldon is also alive but traumatized and in a cage. They release him and put Todd out of his misery after he asks them to finish it.

 

The butcher, Vlad, arrives, dragging Claire by her jaw and Willy and Alex escape and realize all the passengers are transplant patients/recipients and the train workers are harvesting parts from tourists.

 

Sheldon is recaptured and has his chest cracked open and his heart removed. Bound for another car where the transplant recipient awaits. Willy is beaten and Alex, is caged but escapes when one of the men attempt to rape her.

 

At a military checkpoint, Claire is dragged off the train where she was hanging from her mandible by the hook and a chain, she is now currency to be used to bribe the soldiers.

 

When the train finally stops again and the passengers deboard at an archaic hospital, Alex, in disguise, goes with them. It’s full of patients who’ve bought organs and are recovering. Seeing Willy wheeled in and tied to a bed in a cell, she goes to free him. During their escape, Alex recognizes Todd’s eyes in a little boy.

 

But she and Willy are being hunted and Alex realizes, after Willy dies, she will have to kill them all to survive. Alex encounters Vlad and the doctor again who try to inform her that this is all for the greater good. But Alex intends to survive this nightmare.

 

 

This was directed by Gideon Raff. And it is like Turistas Go Home but on a train. Great cast and gruesome scenes, the physical effects are good but what we don’t see but imagine is just as horrifying. It’s sometimes brutal to watch and hear.

 

TW: Rape

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