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"Are you telling me that an ape that lived two million years ago got out of that crate, killed the baggage man and put him in there, then locked everything up neat and tidy, and got away?"
"Yes, I am! It's alive! It must be!"
We know The Thing. We know The Thing from Another World. But did you know there was a third version of this story, a totally unrelated adaptation of John W. Campbell's 1938 novella Who Goes There? This was Horror Express, coming right at the tail end of the Golden Age of British Horror. It is one of the last gasps of the period where gentlemen scientists could cooly handle monsters. Beyond this, the psychology and tone of these films will shift radically as New Hollywood takes over every genre. Perhaps Horror Express was aware of its own retro-ness, which is why it is a period piece. Even the genre choice is classical, an Agatha Christie murder mystery where people die every time the lights go out. Only this time, the mystery is not just who is the killer, but who is the alien possessing?
We gather our cast of characters in 1906 Shanghai, about to board the train west through Tsarist Russia. This is not a time I would particularly want to visit Russia considering the whole 1905 Revolution is still burning on thanks to Tsar Nicholas's incompetence and the nation is in chaos. (Time traveling tourists, take note: do not visit Russia at any time in the 20th century.) What will ruin everybody's journey is one giant wooden crate brought along by Sir Alexander Saxton (the great Christopher Lee). The cranky anthropologist has found a two-million-year-old missing link in a cave in Manchuria, though this particular specimen will cause even more acrimony than Peking Man. Saxton meets up with his college, Dr. Wells (the equally great Peter Cushing). All seems well until a thief, a porter, and others start turning up dead - their faces stained with bloody tears and their eyes rolled back to the whites.
Yes, Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, the twin legends of the Sixties Dracula franchise, star in Horror Express, but this is no Hammer Horror film. Horror Express is actually a Spanish production, shot in Madrid. You'd almost never notice since Lee and Cushing have so much gravitas and the whole film is shot on tight train sets, fitting Hammer style. The one deviance is a funky soundtrack and a few drop-dead gorgeous Spanish models in the cast. Typical of Spanish and Italians films in this era, Horror Express was shot without sound, all dialog added after the fact. If you do not recognize the actor, there's a good chance that is not their voice you're hearing. The stunning women of this movie, Countess Irina (Silvia Tortosa) and Natasha (Helga Line) are both dubbed over by South African actress Olive Gregg.
"Monster!? We're British, you know!" shouts our heroes when suspected. It is a spooky movie but a tastefully spooky movie. In Italy, they were already pushing the envelope for blood and nudity, maybe Spanish filmmakers in the last years of the Franco regime were still worried about censorship. We get a lot of corpses, but the same gore gag with white eyes and red tears every time. The creature is a rotten nasty and has one glowing red eye, but it's not horrifying. The design is a little cute in its classical restraint.
Most of the cast ends up having to wear this prosthetics over their eyes to either have dead whites or glowing reds. You can tell nobody can see shit out of them, and that's fun. Especially when the alien summons an army of zombies and the actors are authentically shambling around.
Horror Express is one of the only movies where Lee and Cushing both get to be the good guy, sharing the Van Helsing role if you will. At first Lee's Saxton is such a prickly bastard you might suspect he could be a villain himself. He is not on this train to make friends, arguing with stationmasters and detectives whenever he can. But once his corpse comes to life and is a goofy ghoul sucking out souls, Saxton has to step up and do some science. Turns out all you really need to counter the energy alien inside the ghoul and its zombies is some bright light. Cushing gets to dissect some bodies, discovering that the alien is stealing our memories by smoothing out the victim's brains. "Smooth as a baby's bottom."
Next time anybody online calls you a "smooth brain", think of Horror Express.
All the science in Horror Express is pure bunk, wrong at every turn but I can forgive it. It fits the period piece goals, actually. Like, our heroes can see the alien's memories to an extent by putting a microscope into the ghoul's eye. This is that old Victorian myth of Optography, that your eye takes a photo of what you last see upon death. The whole method of the alien's possession harkins back to Victorian-era spiritualism and their interest in "supernatural energies". If Lee and Cushing had pulled out some calipers to do some Phrenology too, it would not have been that out of place. What if the nonsense science of Silver Age comic books had more Steampunk vibes? That's Horror Express.
The secret weapon of this movie is Telly Savalas as Captain Kazan, who does not have nearly enough screentime. The ghoul alien is easily defeated but soon it is body snatching and stealing the knowledge it needs to build a spaceship off of Earth. Nobody knows who the creature might be, until Kazan, this swaggering Cossack that marches onto stage late in the third act. Without any real knowledge of what is going on, takes control of the situation. Savalas is gigantic in this role, he swallows the frame whole with his cocky humor and magnificent red costume. (Everybody is dressed great in this movie, gotta love Christopher Lee's dashing mustache paired with a fur hat.) Kazan by pure instinct guesses who the alien is, which creepy Rasputin-like character is helping him, and how to solve the situation: guns. Well, it almost works, unfortunately the alien has vampiric super hypnosis powers so one look in the eyes and you're done.
The editing on the monster attacks is fun. There's a lot of cutting to the train zooming by in terrible speed to imply the violence we cannot see. By the end with Christopher Lee fighting off dozens of zombies in a tight corridor the editing just becomes a frenetic mess of random shots. But did you really expect some Hong Kong-level action here? If you want that in a Hammer Horror-esque film, you need to see The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires.
Ultimately Horror Express is a really fun movie. This is a wonderful movie to have on your personal trophy case of "wonderful things I can say I've seen". "I've seen Christopher Lee and his best friend Peter Cushing fight an alien mummy on a train" - don't you want to be able to tell people that? I can run out of time on a pouring roof top at the moment of my death and tell Deckard "I've seen things you people wouldn't believe" then recount the plot of this movie. That's why genre movies are special.
Next Time! We are moving on to the big boys now, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978).
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