Deadly Doll's Choice: The End of the Line (2007)

When Emily suggested the 2007 Canadian horror film The End of the Line for our monthly swap, I accepted the challenge  but when I checked the flick out and found this staring back from the Netflix screen.....

it did not inspire overwhelming confidence on my part. The Entertainment Today blurb, "Does for Subways what Jaws did for Oceans" went a long way to further my impression of The End of the Line as some kind of subway dwelling creatures (similar to Jarad, but Canadian so I assume there would be copious amount of Maple Ham involved) flick. In the end, there was a kind of monster in subway, in fact, in the whole world, but not the kind that I expected at all. Speaking of expectation, I have to wonder what Emily will think of the film I picked for her, the 1985 Chris Lambert film Subway. Hopefully, she loved spending some time with Luc Besson's action crime film set in the Parisian Metro. So make sure you all stop in over at the Deadly Doll's House to find out what she thought of my pick. Now back to the matter at hand. While only marginally better than the DVD box art that Netflix shows for The End of the Line, the theatrical poster actually gives a little clue to what the film actually is.

Karen (Ilona Elkin) is a nurse working at a psychiatric hospital who begins to have strange visions of eyeless stalkers coming for her, and boarding the nearly deserted subway does little to ease her nerves. She gets harassed by a bleached blonde weirdo, but thankfully runs into fellow traveler, Mike (Nicolas Wright), a nice guy who keeps her company when the train makes an emergency stop. However, the stop is no real emergency. It is the beginning of a massacre. A religious group, expecting doomsday to roll around any time now, has taken to slaughtering unbelievers in an attempt to save their wayward souls. Karen and Mike soon find themselves banded together with a small group of survivors as they attempt to escape the subway system. The closer they get to freedom, the more apparent it is that the doomsday cult has spread much further than the underground tunnels, and the end times might well be neigh.

For the first thirty minutes of The End of the Line, I was still fairly convinced that the big bad were going to turn out to be a monster. Even after the first few of the zealots with their terribly inconvenient looking cross knives show up, I still suspected they were rounding up meat for some kind of monsters. I suppose the subway setting just planted Midnight Meat Train in my mind and wouldn’t let go. I have to admit though the first act, which also suffers from some confusingly placed time jumps, was barely registering with me. Then it took the hard turn into a religious based horror where the evil became the knife toting members of the Church of Hope who were intent on cleansing the world. With the uniforms that brought to mind both Nazi Brown shirts and bike riding Mormons at the same time and a collection of blank stares plastered across their faces, they become a faceless killing machine intent on carrying out their divinely inspired mission.

I would be kind of remiss if I talked about this film and didn’t mention the current doomsday cult prediction going around. According to some schools of Christian thought (note I said some), the clock is up on the world in only nine days. That’s right folks. You’ve only got until May 21 until the whole tribulation kicks off, and then by December the whole shebang will wrap up for good. There are a whole lot of reasons I’m not worried about the end of the world. For one, I’m not someone who’s looking forward to the world ending. I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m having a good time. Secondly, there’s been someone saying the world is going to end since the world began. If it hasn’t happened so far, then it’s not got a great chance to happening now, but in a day and age when people on both sides of religion and politics are getting more radicalized, I have to wonder how preposterous the events detailed in The End of the Line really are. After all, there was no sign in the film of an actual Rapture; it was men killing men because of what some other man said about a book that was written long, long ago.

Director Maurice Devereaux has only made four films in his fifteen years as a filmmaker, but despite The End of the Line’s floundering first act, once the film gets going, it really gets there. Working from his own script, The End of the Line explicitly points out the dangers of zealotry without making grand or pejorative statements, and it was clearly a subject that Devereaux felt strongly about. Working with many of the same crew that had made his previous three films, the film feels assured even during the moments were timing seems a bit shaky. There are also a good many moments of graphic violence, and while they are used for jump scares in the beginning of the film, the blood really flows in the third act. Watching the film left me a bit paranoid around the edges, but my gore-hound cravings were more than satisfied.

The only real downside to the film is the cast. While I thought many of the actors were solid, no one really ever stepped up to become an individual. While watching I kept trying to catch people’s names, but more often than not my notes are littered with annotations such as “hero guy”, “medic girl”, “anime chick”, and “consistently stabbed guy” (seriously how does someone get so repeatively stabbed so often). There wasn’t a one of them that I disliked, but I couldn’t honestly say I was rooting for anyone. Well that is except for “anime chick” who I really wanted to bash “creepy blonde guy” to death with a hammer. I never caught “creepy blonde guy‘s” name either (I think it was Patrick as played by Robin Wilcock.), but he was the standout performance among the entire cast. I do have to also mention the wonderfully played, emotionality complex scene where the group of survivors is confronted by two young followers of The Church of Hope.

Having both the antagonists and protagonists feel anonymous gave the whole picture a feel as if the players were symbolic of the general, happy, normal masses and the faceless, anti-other. I don’t want to diminish any actor’s performance because on average they were all good. The question is this. Was the decision to relieve the characters of all but the most present back-story and base character traits a conscious decision or did the actors just fail to define themselves? No matter if the answer is that I enjoy The End of the Line because of its delicate crafting or in spite of its terrible flaws, there is always the chance I liked the film far more than I should because I agree with the film makers political and religious stances. I’d rather think I enjoyed an original take on a horror premise that went in a completely different direction from what I expected. In any event, this month I definitely have to thank Emily, that Deadliest of Deadly Dolls, for her pick, and I can’t wait to see what she has in store for me next month. (If you know, we’re all not busy being tribulated upon.)

Bugg Rating

You Don't Know Shat! : Disaster on the Coastliner (1979)

Hello folks and welcome to the first installment of the 3rd Annual Celebration of William Shatner’s birthday, You Don’t Know Shat! With all the Horrorhound talk going on around The Lair this month, some of you may have thought I would let Shatner’s birthday slip my mind, but how could I? To kick things off, I thought I’d look at a flick that I’d never even heard of before it cropped up on Netflix Instant Watch in the last few days. Disaster on the Coastliner might sound like it should involve some high seas hijinks, but this made for ABC television movie is all about run away trains… and of course the runaway locomotive of sexual magnetism that is William Shatner. I can’t seem to get away from trains these days, but where The Sleeping Car was full of supernatural terror, The Coastliner is caused by good old fashioned human arrogance and vindictiveness which is just the kind of thing The Shat was put on this world to stop.

Disaster on the Coastliner is cut from the same cloth that produced movies like The Towering Inferno, Airport, and The Poseidon Adventure in the theaters, and brought to the small screen disasters featuring one named menaces such as Flood! (1976) and Fire! (1977). Like so many disaster epics, it was also featured a cast full of notable actors hamming it up on the small screen. Apart from Shatner, the film also boast appearances from Lloyd Bridges, Pat Hingle, Raymond Burr, Robert Fuller, E.G. Marshall, Yvette Mimieux, and Paul L. Smith. Smith plays Jim Waterman, a man convinced that the Trans-Allied Railroad Corporation covered out the truth about the death of his wife and daughter in a tragic train derailment. So now to get the corporation to fess up to the truth, he’s taken over one train and remotely hijacked the other setting them on a course to collide head on unless company head Estes Hill (Burr) makes a public apology for the cover-up.

The plot is as simple as can be, but Disaster on the Coastliner doesn’t garner much of its entertainment value from the scintillating plot. Rather it picks up much of its steam from the tiny side plots that develop alongside the trains speeding toward each other. Shatner, for instance, is in disguise when we first meet him trying to avoid some cops. Using Yvette Mimieux’s character Paula as extra cover to get on the train, Shatner, the ultra slick Stuart Peters, starts up a train bound romance with her once on board. While she sees though his cat and mouse game with the police, she goes along with him because he’s just so damn charming. That’s the kind of thing that no one would ever get away with but Shatner. Then there’s the side plot about the safety of the Vice President’s wife who is on board one of the speeding trains. While neither she nor her Secret Service detail become characters in the film, Lloyd Bridges, playing the agent sent in to monitor her progress from the railway computer control, is quite the character. Anyone who has ever seen Airplane has seen Bridges play this same kind of character, but this time it was supposed to have been played straight. How E.G. Marshall, who shared all of his scenes with Bridges, kept a straight face while acting opposite the hammy star of SeaHunt is a credit to Marshall’s acting skill.

While doing a bit of looking around about this film, I came across a number of sites featuring posts from what I can only describe as “train nerds”. Much like any other nerd, they seem to live to poke hole and wag their finger at anything that diverges from what they know to be the very accurate and quite dorky truth. Disaster on the Coastliner apparently is full of these instances. The first of which, that the Trans-Allied Railroad Corporation was fictitious, seemed pretty obvious to me as all the exteriors are clearly marked AmTrack. Secondly the Trainees… Trainers….Train Enthusiasts point out that movie conveniently ignores the fact that there are emergency brakes in every rail car, that no train system would ever solely rely on computer control, and that a hastily thrown together split track barely welded together would ever be able to resist the force of a 100 MPH runaway train. To these nerds I say become proper nerds of something like Star Trek and you wont care about the technical minutia because you’ll be way too busy enjoying Mr. Shatner’s performance

Director Richard C. Sarafian, who started in television before transitioning over to feature films in the early ’70’s including such gems as Vanishing Point, definitely relied on his skill at shooting speed to give the TV flick its greatest point of suspense. Filming the speeding locomotives from similar low angles just as he had in Vanishing Point certainly helps to maintain suspense throughout the movie. Though I could just as well have watched a whole ninety minutes for Shatner having fun playing the caddish con artist, Sarafian strings together all the disparate parts of the film in an interesting way. He especially excelled at the film’s final moments which of course included the obligatory walking on top of the trains shot. This final sequence, played by Shatner and Paul L. Smith, put both the actors to the test as well as Shatner’s hairpiece which never looked better or like it was working quite so hard during all of Trek.

Disaster on the Coastliner is not the only disaster film with William Shatner in it, but it is easily one of the better TV movie roles that The Shat took on in the limbo time between the end of Star Trek and be beginning of T.J. Hooker. It allowed the actor to be a charmer, do some comedy, and act as a supporting character, but in the end be hailed as the big hero. That kind of rundown exemplifies an almost perfect situation for Shatner (obviously he should be the lead character). The movie itself is not of the highest quality, but, if you’ve got Netflix, as an Instant Watch selection, one could do way, way, way, way worse. I hope you all enjoyed this first installment of You Don’t Know Shat!, and I’ll be back each Friday this month with a new entry as well as on March 22 to celebrate the Eightieth birthday of everyone’s favorite ham, William Alan Shatner.

Bugg Rating

As this was TV fare, there's no trailer, but here's the opening scene.

The Sleeping Car (1990): All Aboard, Next Stop, Terror!

As I don’t live in an area where commuter travel by train is a viable option, my only experience with trains is the hellish undertaking known as a cross-country trip by rail. Spending anything beyond four hours in coach on a train is akin to spending the greater part of the day in the DMV, and your fellow travelers are suspect at best. I don’t feel at all bad making this generalization about them because, in turn, I expect they feel the same about me. I’ve always suspected the way to go is to have your own car, and my wife and I have visions of a Nick and Nora style existence where rail travel would mean a number of cocktails and silk robes for all. However, I don’t think I could extend this desire for sleeping car life to living in one that has been remodeled as a trailer home. The same can’t be said of today’s protagonist who finds not being able to resist the kitschy allure of stationary rail living can be a hazard to your health (and life expectancy). So come along and hitch a ride hobo style while I tell you folks a little bit about The Sleeping Car.

It all begins with a massive rail accident in which two trains slam headlong into each other. The conductor is one of the only survivors, leaping free of the train. While the blame for the accident would fall on the conductor, he knows the real culprit is his watchman, who was entrusted to make sure the track is clear, but was busy having sex with a girl he had snuck on the train. Let go from the work he had known all his life, the conductor became a bitter and mean old man. He moved one of the train’s remaining cars, a sleeper, out behind his house, and for years he took out his rage and anger on a number of innocent young girls. Years later, Jason (David Naughton), a middle aged student just getting a start in college, takes up residence in the train car turned apartment, but he, along with his girlfriend (Judie Aronson) and suspect professor (Jeff Conaway) soon find out that while Jason might be the only one living there, something else still exists.

I must admit that I was attracted to watching The Sleeping Car for the same reason I have enjoyed films like Death Bed and Attack of the Killer Refrigerator, the absurdity. What I really didn’t expect was for The Sleeping Car to actually be a serviceable piece of cheese which actually contained a smattering of horrific moments. Director Douglas Curtis only had only one other directorial effort to his name, 1977’s The Hazing, though later in his career he would transition to being a producer with films like Freddy vs. Jason and Shoot Em Up to his credit. Even so, Curtis clearly knew what went into a horror film, and working with cinematographer David Lewis (The Hills Have Eyes 2, Night of the Demons), he built a decent level of suspense with the film’s visuals. Unfortunately, he also set up an uneven tone for the film. The Sleeping Car cannot decide if it wants to play it straight emphasizing the supernatural entities’ murders and rapes, be a comedy leaning on Jeff Conaway’s journalism professor for laughs, or something in between. It also greatly suffers from a soundtrack dominated by pan flute more at home in a martial arts epic than in the confines of a haunted rail car film.

What really makes The Sleeping Car work is the cast who got the memo about what kind of film The Sleeping Car would be. David Naughton, star of John Landis’ An American Werewolf in London, wisecracks with his tongue firmly planted in cheek throughout, but he still easily makes the transition when the film veers out toward the horrific. Jeff Conaway, who is still probably best known from Grease (or Celebrity Rehab), is a full on larger than life personality here full of braggadocio and douchy tendencies. In short, he seems much like Jeff Conaway. The real question for me is how his character became a journalism professor and who would want to take his class? When I think ethical media practices, Jeff Conaway is hardly the image that springs to mind. There are also two great performances from supporting cast. First off is Invasion of the Body Snatchers’ Kevin McCarthy, who appears as Naughton’s New Agey neighbor who knows all about the evil residing in the train car. McCarthy is gloriously over the top, and it was fun to watch the veteran actor chew up the screen. The last memorable performance is Judie Aronson. Playing Kim, a college age girl caught in a love (or lust) triangle between Naughton and Conaway, Aronson holds her own against the two more experienced actors and manages to come off as more than cinematic fluff.

If you’re looking for a horror film which will scare the bejeebers out of you, then The Sleeping Car is not the film you want. However, if you’re looking for a flick with a few laughs, some decent enough scares, a smattering of gore, some ghostly supernatural notes, and Jeff Conaway, then look no further as you’ve found it. The Sleeping Car, a high concept idea given low concept execution, yet still miraculously turned out to be something more than the sum of its parts. It’s the kind of underappreciated cult film that makes the constant digging though dreck worth it. It will cause me to take chances on dozens of other films. It will lead me to look for other train inspired horror films or other terrors featuring people living in strange places. It will give me faith that there are still plenty of obscure gems out there still well worth discovering. While The Sleeping Car may not be a classic of modern cinema, it is the kind of flick that will keep a love of cult horror on the rails.

Bugg Rating