Own the rights?
18 out of 26 people found the following review useful: How can one writer mess up this big??, 20 August 2009 Author: dschmeding from Germany
*** This review may contain spoilers ***
"Train" has to be one of the most ridiculous movies ever. The script is such a mess that you can't count the illogical moments and plot holes. First of all it is an obvious "Hostel"-Ripoff... a group of wrestlers goes to Russia for a wrestling contests and drops off for a party in a Russian town which causes them to split with their group and miss their train. From here on you can replace the hostel with a train and the Snuff-fun with organ-reaping. Guess what, they get on a train after a "nice" lady helps them since no one speaks English (of course) and they don't know a word Russian (which helps when being in Russia) and soon some real strange Russian guys turn up while one after the other of the wrestlers goes missing. You get some pretty graphic torture-scenes, mostly shot in the dark and with the typical modern gritty style but the best part is.... exactly that makes no sense when you have a train in your plot with doctors who harvest organs to sell. What we learn off this movie is: - if you harvest organs, keep your victims alive while doing it and pummel them with knuckle dusters and pee on them when capturing them - when removing organs, just tear them out... eyes can be ripped out with funny instruments in one move, hearts are best taken out after sawing open the living victims chest and then looking for treasures with your bare hands... oh yes, and the cut- off penis sure also was of use for some one. - a grown males torn out eyes are best transplanted to an 8year old boy. - Russian thugs are damn evil (partly they look like Lord of the Rings Characters) and powerful... when your heroine hides under the train they just push the train with their incredible Russian power, just to get an axe into the torso for their effort - When you are left in a Russian village, all your friends are dead and a strange mass of people walks through the dark just follow them - Russian thugs look like bears but move like cats, so you never hear them crawling up behind you (about 10 times in the movie), especially not when you are standing in the middle of an empty bridge. - if you aim for modern horror audiences graphic torture and repeated raw punches into womens faces seem to be some kind of recipe for success - when you blow up a train on a bridge and leave a thug on the rails, the part of the train you disconnected miraculously disappears so the thug can be overrun by another train for dramatic effect - if you are lost somewhere in the Russian hills in a country where you cannot communicate... you just return home to the USA, so the lazy director does not have to make up more ridiculous ideas. - if you want to quit wrestling to be a doctor and you live through a gory nightmare like this its just logical that you continue wrestling with a pretty Russian new haircutI have rarely seen a movie with so many plot-holes and idiotic situations while obviously having some budget and known actors (BTW... the parts where Thora Birch breaks out of heroine character and shows emotions are a mess) and being a totally calculated cash-off on the torture-porn hype. With movies like this you need your directors license revoked for a hundred reasons and its a shame that movies like "Train" are paid for while hundreds of good scripts will never be made into movies. Stay away, far away from this.
6 out of 11 people found the following review useful: Train (2008), 11 September 2009 Author: morrigan1982 from Greece
I like B-movies and most of them I find entertaining. They make some sense and they make me laugh some times, but this movie didn't make any sense at all. I like gore, but I also like to understand what is happening. Maybe the idea was not so bad; the script though didn’t make much sense. Trapped in a train with a bunch of crazy people and they can not help them selves at all. Why? They are athletes. They couldn’t do some damage? Not even something small? They could use sooo many stuff as weapons but they prefer to run and let themselves get caught. When you see what will happen to you if you get caught and you know that you will suffer a lot before you die, wouldn’t you prefer to jump off the train? Than at least you will have a chance of survival? I won’t even start about a bunch of other stuff that just weren’t right because than I would spoil it for those brave souls who will see it. The acting was bad. The director… made me dizzy! Why should you take a shot up side down in a movie like this? It is not about art when it comes to this film. Art has nothing to do with it. Poor choice of shots. Maybe it could be better. We will never know. But the result was so bad. I would not waste my time if I where you. “Hostel” was great, I loved it. This is not “Hostel” and it has a little to do with it. Some ideas you might find them the same. But I fail to see the resemblance.
8 out of 15 people found the following review useful: Not bad at all....just completely horrible!, 5 September 2009 Author: Jon Death from United States
Yes, hit the villain once, lay him out and instead of grabbing one of many weapons he used to torture and mutilate your dearest friend, run away and abandon the living.This movie is really weak. It's basically a less creative version of Hostel and Touristas that takes place on a train in the Ukraine or Czech Republic...basically the edge of Europe. Most the acting is pretty lousy and a couple of the "college" athlete characters look over 30 years old pushing 40. Even if you like slasher films, it's no fun when victims borderline volunteer to be tortured and mutilated.Thora Birch must not have read the script or they really needed the money. I suspect Gideon Raff is another one of these talentless Europeans that the American film studios will finance simply because he's European and will charm them with an accent then deliver absolute failure.Avoid this movie, it's a prime example as to why so many people are just stealing movies rather than renting or buying them. If we're to pay for crap like this then at the very least give us some nudity that's actually worth looking at.
Hostel meets Touristas, 17 December 2009 Author: doctorgonzo23 from Canada
Not exactly sure what I was expecting with this one. I figured, hey, Thora Birch is in this, it can't be ALL bad. A bunch of American kids traveling around in a train getting terrorized in some fashion... sounds watchable. Unfortunately, I was not satisfied.If my comment title hasn't tipped you off yet, you're in for an hour and a half of equal parts torture porn and survival horror. There's nothing new here and no worth while twists to raise this movie above (or even up to the level of) many similar genre pictures. It seems to meas if all the horror directors have tired of setting their pictures in the rural south, invariably populated with crazed backwoods cannibals and have instead focused on semi-fictional demonic visions of Eastern Europe populated by depraved butchers for hire. The acting is flat and the characters are so unlikeable (not to mention the lack of definition or development) you just can't muster any emotional ties. You won't even find yourself rooting for the bad guy here... you just won't care.There is one facet of the movie that does seem to shine though. Love it or hate it, the gore in this film is so over the top and just down right rotten and visceral that it will produce a response. The camera does not flinch away... ever. I guess we're all just too complacent as horror fans these days. Gore like this used to be able to carry a film on the merits of the blood spilled alone, as the super bloody extreme cinema was relatively rare, often found only in hard care Asian productions. Now, every movie you watch seems to be teeming with so much of it that we as fans are beginning to demand more than just a slasher guts fest.There are so many cool horror movies out there that invest their time and effort in delivering more in terms of originality. Unless you're curious, I would seek out something with more depth.
6 out of 12 people found the following review useful: The wrong side of the tracks., 4 September 2009 Author: tyler-and-jack from Edinburgh.
Thora Birch and . . . . . a bunch of other people star in this gruesome horror movie. A bunch of American wrestlers (yes, I said wrestlers) end up boarding a late train with their coach and assistant coach but soon realise they've stumbled onto a real terror train. As people disappear and the blood starts to flow some shocking revelations about their chosen transport come to light and anyone with the energy left will have to use it all in their fight for survival.Director/writer Gideon Raff is pretty fearless in some ways. Fearless for what he shows us on screen and fearless for blending in material that shows their influences all too clearly. The most notable comparison here would be Hostel, as this film feels a lot like "Hostel on a train", but there are other movies within that subgenre Raff has clearly enjoyed and he passes that on to the viewer, lingering over nasty piles of viscera when others would have already moved the camera on.As for the cast of possible victims, it's obvious that Birch is the leading starlet and she will be the one we end up rooting for but it has to be said that the other characters (the good AND bad) are often given just enough actual personality to be memorable, but not enough for us to care TOO much when the blades start to get sharpened.It's not for the squeamish and many people may label it with that ridiculous "torture porn" tag that has been created in the past few years but it's actually also a very good horror that happens to be about a cadre of people up to some extremely nasty business.See this if you like: Hostel, Hostel II, Paradise Lost.
0 out of 1 people found the following review useful: Lackluster torture flick..., 8 December 2009 Author: mdnobles19 from United States
What originally was suppose to be a remake of the Jamie Lee Curtis star slasher pic ended up taking the wrong route and decided to be it's own movie and guess what it's another torture flick, come on! Not once was it not clichéd and it wasn't suspenseful, scary, original or inspired it's just another rehash of Hostel and not in a good way. I thought the acting was not very good from anyone except from Thora Birch who got unfortunately stuck in this rotting waste of a horror film, the filming was alright and it had the perfect setting but not much ignition, the only part that had me on the edge was when they were being chased throughout the train and they get trapped in a room and they soon find themselves in pitch black as the train goes through a tunnel, that was a pretty good part but the rest seemed too familiar. This movie just didn't seem focused and was pointless in the end and they should of went with the original idea of a remake of the slasher Terror Train which might of had a much better payoff than this, it was just forgettable rubbish trying to cash in on the torture craze. Overall this was like Transsiberian meets Hostel and not in a good way, it had flaws and the whole thing was problematic and rushed, yes it had a lot of gore but there seemed to be no room for suspense, terror and scares and that's maybe why they stuck with just Train for the title and not Terror Train this time around. Not recommended!
0 out of 1 people found the following review useful: Never mind the movie, feel the splatter, 28 November 2009 Author: mattbaxter72 from United Kingdom
Torture porn is a really overused description, one that tends to be slapped onto anything with a bit of blood and guts which the reviewer didn't like very much. Hostel, for example, is nothing like it; it has a storyline, characters, even a bit of subtext going on there. Real porn is where the splatter has no reason to exist, there are no actual characters, and no plot other than to get us from one splatter scene to the next. Train is genuine torture porn.Oh, sure, there is an attempt at a plot, but not one that makes any sense. Organ harvesters - on a train? Rumbling through the middle of nowhere, taking out bits of bodies by yanking at them until the connecting tissue snaps? Harvesting tongues, penises, and other not-exactly-transplantable organs? The whole movie is just an excuse to show some graphic, very nasty scenes of dismemberment, shot in leering close-up, and anything else - character, plot, dialogue - is perfunctory at best. The script feels like it was written on the back of a cigarette packet, no one behaves in a remotely sensible way - 'oh look, here's a locked door with copious blood-stains in front of it, let's find out what's behind it by STEPPING OUT OF A MOVING TRAIN AND SMASHING A WINDOW FROM THE OUTSIDE. What school do these kids go to, James Bond High School? Let me say again - I've got no objection to graphic splatter, so long as there's some point to it. If there's no worthwhile story, no reason for the gore to exist, you have porn. This movie, in other words. A nasty, degrading experience made by stupid people who probably think they're pushing some boundary or other. You're not, guys. You're just stringing together a bunch of random scenes of people being chopped up. Well done.Just one thing before I go - what the hell happened to Thora Birch? Between this and Deadline (also unbelievably awful, though with less people having their skin cut off), is she aiming to be the new Cuba Gooding Jr or something? Please, Thora, fire your agent and start doing actual movies again. Pretty please?
6 out of 13 people found the following review useful: This isn't a movie this is a snuff film.., 5 September 2009 Author: jamesoshea91 from United Kingdom
I consider my self an avid horror fan and can sit through anything but when it comes to a movie like hostel then i find myself turning away,much like i did with this rip off of hostel. I don't know what is so appealing about sitting for over 90 minutes and watching people being tortured,in my opinion horror has sunk soooo low its unbelievable, Hollywood has run out of ideas so they resort to torture, what makes it worse is that it barely has a story, couple of kids get caught on a train, and on this train is a bunch of people harvesting people for organs, now i know what you thinking it must be hard to operate properly riding on a bumpy train, but no thats OK because the easy way it to make a cut in you then rip you apart with your bare hands just tear those organs out of you the old fashioned way.So we have kids having fun on a train then we have the main characters boyfriend getting caught and murdered and then a search starts and during that search they get picked of one by one, get tortured then we have the running away then the torturing then the last guy standing smacks the villain with a weapon and instead of killing him off,guess what...he runs away inevitably getting caught and killed and then there's torture, a girl hanging by her mouth on a hook while missing a leg.So there torture, running,screaming,knuckle dusters to th face,baseball bats to the head, more running more screaming and guess what more torture. I don't see the appeal sitting watching organs getting pulled out and mince human meat all over the place, its disgusting and un-entertaining, if your squeamish don't watch i found myself gagging.It makes you wonder, if you enjoy this, would you have any problem watching a real snuff film?? Or would you even know the difference??
6 out of 13 people found the following review useful: Hostel on a train, 23 August 2009 Author: doughnutboy20 from United Kingdom
Not a bad little horror really, if you want a horror with lots of gore and violence and not much in the way of story. Probably would be good for a night in with some beers and some mates. The acting is good, I suppose for this sort of film. Thora Birch didn't make the film, but didn't ruin it either, so I suppose you can't ask much more than that from your lead.Obviously darker than some other horror films out there, with many grisly deaths in the film, but at least you don't have to concentrate to hard. To summarise, the pros out-way the cons and I have to give it a 6 out of 10. But I can't help but wonder, if it had turned a bit more away from the whole Hostel type image, the film might of been a cult cracker.But was still good and very, very violent (but no reason to try and censor it Lionsgate).
7 out of 15 people found the following review useful: Not bad at all, 31 August 2009 Author: chapsmack from United States
For fans of gore with a not so bad of a story line this is quite a decent movie. Although "decent" might not be the right word in this kind of a movie since it is anything but! There may be some loopholes but all these are if you are thinking excessively. See the movie for what it is, and the movie lives up to it's name for a low budget production. Although Thora Birch might not really be my ideal kind of a revenge seeker, I did like the turn about in the end. I was wishing they could have started off with the revenge plot already as I did like the vengeance seekeing scenes which were less drawn out than the punishment inflicted by the villains. 6/10.
Add another review
