Train Week: The Cassandra Crossing (1976)

One of the first DVDs I ever bought was the UK widescreen release of The Cassandra Crossing, and that might tell you something about my love for train- and disaster movies. It's also a fitting final movie in Ninja Dixon's Train Week because to me it's one of those movies I revisit from time to time and it never fails to entertain me. Maybe it's one of those movies only for us that appreciate disaster movies filled with well-paid stars, but he story itself isn't half bad and the typical criticism against government and military that was so popular in 70's cinema is very evident here. Probably a way for producer Carlo Ponti to cash in a little bit extra on the anti-establishment trend, but it still works quite good.

Three Swedish "terrorists" from the Swedish Peace Movements infiltrates the World Health Organisation building in Geneva, but everything goes wrong and they get shot - inside a secret laboratory. One of them, played by Lou Castel, escapes but is infected with a deadly disease! He manages to get aboard the train to Stockholm and soon he's spreading the illness to the other passengers. A representative from the US government, Mackenzie (a tired Burt Lancaster)  shows up and takes control over the situation and he decides that the only way to deal with the illness is to quarantine the train - and maybe, just maybe, kill everyone aboard!

The Cassandra Crossing is a very competent and maybe a bit to calculated disaster-drama with an awesome cast of both superstars and has-beens (and I love has-beens). Just casting Richard Harris and Ava Gardner as an ex-couple who really loves each other is brilliant. Or Lionel Stander as the conductor... OJ Simpson (when he still was someone people liked) as a priest, or Martin Sheen as Sophia Loren's toyboy! Lancaster is always good and his nearest man is John Philip Law. Add Lee Strassberg, Ann Turkel, Ingrid Thulin, Ray Lovelock and you have one of the best casts in a disaster movie ever. It might not be as good or awesome as Mark Robson's masterpiece Earthquake or John Guillermin's luxurious The Towering Inferno, it's has a more gritty and European feeling and the sense that the government officials doesn't care about us anyway - far from the heroic stars in the two movies mentioned aboved. Maybe The Cassandra Crossing is more connected to the conspiracy thriller in theme and style, something the final scene echoes quite much.

What I never noticed before is the strong holocaust-theme of the movie. Not only because of concentration camp survivor Kaplan (Lee Strassberg), but rebuilding of the train to an air sealed container, the oxygen pumped into the train, which looks like gas, the trip through Poland and into Germany and the sounds of the guards screaming "Achtung!" outside. The movie gets darker from this moment and and ends in disaster for many of the passengers.

As an action-adventure this is a great movie. The fantastic aerial footage on the train and locations looks just stunning and that in combination with some train-climbing stunts, a nice explosion and lots of shoot-outs and even some blood and graphic violence this is a winner. The highlight is the final, and I don't wanna ruin it for you - but it has a lot of very cool and violent scenes (that was cut from the US video version that was released in the eighties) and really good miniature effects and big scale destruction.

The Cassandra Crossing is one of those real underrated thrillers that never seem to handle the bullying from the Hollywood big shots, but if you find the widescreen version on DVD - buy it! A good, spectacular train movie  and one of my personal favourites. 

Train Week: Amok Train (1989)

From the director of Iced, Jeff Kwitny, comes one of the most underrated gore movies of the eighties (together with the amazing Spider Labyrinth): Amok Train, also known under the stupid title Beyond the Door III. Produced by our favourite schlockmeister Ovidio G. Assonitis, this co-production between USA, Yugoslavia and Italy delivers everything you would like from a movie: gore, nudity, miniatures and a train! I still only have the old Dragon DVD, but I guess I should buy the US DVD sooner or later - or just pray to Satan to make this be released on blu-ray! That would be awesome, yeah? Oh, the story? Well, as you can hear from the title this fits directly into Ninja Dixon's Train Week and it's probably the most absurd movie of the bunch!

A group of stupid American students goes to Yugoslavia to see some ancient old tradition out in the backwoods. Professor Andromolek (Bo Svenson) welcomes them, but we soon understand that he's not that nice! He's really after one of the girls, who happens to have the sign of the devil on her as a birth mark, and the professor wants her to fornicate with Satan himself to bring antichrist back to the world... or something. Anyway, they manages to escape and jumps aboard a train - the Amok Train! Soon they're getting killed one by one from supernatural powers, all connected with the train! Blood! Gore! Limbs! Gore again!

As you can see Hostel wasn't first with bringing stupid kids into Eastern Europe to be killed in gory fashion. This is the mother of all movies that tries to make us believe that this is the most dangerous part of Europe (it's not, believe me - try Stockholm a Saturday night instead). It's also a great movie. Not when it comes to the story or acting, but the gore! The atmosphere! The locations! Everything is perfection. Most of the movie is set on a dark dirty train and they manages to make it look repulsive and disgusting. The totally over-the-top gore sets the tone for the whole movie and prepare for a lot of latex getting ripped apart, lots of blood and brutal deaths.

I don't wanna sound like teenage gorehound here, but the gore IS fab. Or do teenage gorehounds use the word "fab"? I have no idea, but I love that they actually don't shy away from the creative deaths. They show everything in glorious details and it looks quite nice. Sure, clearly fake heads and stuff like that, but it's graphic and nasty. The scene where the train driver gets his head squeezed off under the train is fantastic, but so is every death here. Fans of miniatures has a lot to see here also. They are cheap and primitive but adds a lot of colour to the almost fairy tale quality of the locations and story. In one insane sequence the train leaves the track and crashes through a forest and into a lake - just to kill two characters! It's excessive silliness but also one of the reasons this movie works so well.

I can't say so much about the acting. Like some of you might have noticed I never been a fan of Bo Svenson. There's something contrived over his acting and he seldom seem happy with what he's doing. Not even here, which is odd because he has a chance to wear a rad goaty, a cape and worship Satan. I would have loved such a job!

The Yugoslavian setting boosts the production value a lot and this movie looks a lot more expensive than it probably was. A very underrated production and one of my favourite train movies. Give it a chance, will ya?

Train Week: Tezz (2012)

I started this train week with Junya Sato's 1975 classic The Bullet Train and when I wrote that review I still had no idea that I would watch a Bollywood remake a couple of days later! Tezz sounded interesting, had good actors and the story was vaguely similar to The Bullet Train. But it took me a just a few minutes to realize that this was the exact same movie, just with the action boosted and more musical numbers.

The story is basically the same, except here Ajay Devgn plays an honest Indian business owner who works and lives in the UK without permit and also hires other Indians how hasn't got a permit to work and stay in the country. When he's busted his whole life is destroyed and he's forced to leave his family and is ruined. So he decides, together with two companions, to take revenge on the society with placing a bomb on the train to Glasgow and demanding a couple of millions to not let the bombs go off - because they will go off if the trains goes under a certain speed....bla bla bla, just read the synopsis on The Bullet Train instead.

Tezz is very much like any ordinary Hollywood-remake. The scenes that are smaller chase and action-scenes in the original are here blown up to ridiculous show-pieces of stunts, car crashes and shoot-outs. Far from the low-key realistic approach The Bullet Train has. This is of course nothing wrong, as long as it's entertaining and keeps us entertained. Shot in the UK it also look bigger and more expensive than usual and most of the UK (aka non-Indian) cast is actually good - which is a rare thing in Indian movies where taking the first white person in the street seems to be the foremost casting-decision.

I've loved Ajay Devgn since I saw him in Singham, but here he plays a much more normal (but of course extremely talented martial arts fighter... don't ask, he just is!) man, with a lot of the machoism gone and some human emotions instead. Anil Kapoor is his nemesis, the police hunting him, and is also excellent. You could see him in the surprisingly entertaining Tom Cruise ego-trip Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol recently.

The action is really good very James Bond-esque, especially the lengthy motocross chase and a Parkour-styled chase by foot. Lots of old-school stunts, which is something I appreciate from time to time (but not a must, the story is most important not how they do the stunts). The fights is also in glorious over-the-top Bollywood-o-rama style with people flying far and far away after being hit plus some ultra-slowmo intercut with normal speed á The Matrix. The biggest disappointment is that much of the excellent stuff on the train in the original movie is scaled down and most of the thrills is on the ground far away from the speeding train.

Like I mentioned above this is a scene for scene remake of The Bullet Train which means they even copied a technical mistake! Yes! In Bullet Train a character gets shot in slowmo but due to a technical problem that sequences got overexposed and looks totally surreal, but works fine and is dramatic enough for the filmmakers to keep it in the movie. In Tezz, in the same scene, the exact same thing happens - but the overexposure is created by processing the image to look the same! Fun detail, and I doubt director Priyadarshan had any idea about this!

Tezz is a fun and spectacular, but very generic and mainstream action movie. Don't listen to the idiots that claims it's a copy of Speed and The Taking of Pelham 123 - because it's not. They just copied The Bullet Train and nothing else!

Train Week: Under Siege 2: Dark Territory (1995)

This might be the first full review of a Steven Seagal movie on Ninja Dixon. I'm not a big fan of Seagal, I find him boring as an actor and martial artists, but some of his movies is entertaining and has a huge amount of graphic violence. That's enough for me. The first Under Siege is actually one of the best Die Hard scenario-movies out there (and I heard the first draft was a Die Hard sequel) and Under Siege 2: Dark Territory is a surprisingly entertaining and spectacular sequel - and the only Seagal movie I've seen in cinema! It always takes some courage to admit that I actually like this one (and Belly of the Beast, but don't tell anyone!). But believe it or not, I'm just an ordinary guy, like everyone else...

Casey Ryback (Seagal, who else?) is back. This time for a train trip together with his niece Sarah (a very young Katherine Heigl!). Of course a gang of terrorists hijacks the train and controls a deadly satellite from it - because two of the passengers carries the codes to take over the satellite. Don't ask. Just accept this. Anyway, it won't take long until Ryback goes Jason Voorhees on the terrorists (among them the awesome Everett McGill!) and he gets some help from a "funny" porter and of course his niece can kick some ass to. That's about it.

A story thin as every other Die Hard scenario movie, but what makes this so damn entertaining is that it's set on a train. This is good for many reasons:

* People fighting outside the train.
* Dummy deaths.
* People falling from train which ends in dummy deaths.
* More people fighting on the outside of the train.

That's more or less what I expect and want from an action movie set on a train, there's not need for anything else. You know it's dangerous if you put stuntmen on the outside of the train, it's hard to fake and Under Siege 2 has plenty of roof-action and dummies falling and getting crushed by the train. There's also a great stunt when some poor sucker falls from the train and hits some tool shed by the side of the track, goes through it and lands in a pile of rubber stones. All in one take. Awesome.

Of course every scene is totally ridiculous, but that's just nice because I don't want a social-realistic drama when I watch a movie called Under Siege 2: Dark Territory. I want gory and graphic action, and this show has plenty of it. Lots of knife-stabbings, squibs, broken limbs and burning people. I'm not saying that this is a masterpiece, but it is in the terrorists-on-a-train genre. It just delivers so much stupidity and violence that it's hard to resist.

Steven Seagal is still in good shape (like G said when he first saw Seagal in this movie: "Ah, this is before he started to drink!") and probably makes one of his crappiest acting-performances ever (Well, he wasted a good opportunity in Machete by not acting at all. Stupid fucker!), but his desperate tries to say serious lines and look sad is a sight to behold and part of the fun. He handles the action better and he gets a lot of chances to kill people in a lot of creative ways.

Under Siege 2 is sadistic entertainment, one of those movies that only could have been done in the nineties. I miss that period of ultra-expensive ultra-violent close-to-republican crap-shit-turd flicks. They had their charm and is a nice reality-escape. 

Train Week: The Bullet Train (1975)

I reality I hate trains. I just see them as a one long coffin of boredom, and it takes forever to get somewhere. Not to mention the smell, the screaming bastard-kids and the over-priced restaurant. Have you noticed that the first hour often is quiet nice and cozy, but then the smell and dirt creeps up on you and when you finally arrive you're a germ-bomb of sweat, dirty and the stench of seats that reeks of twenty years of farting!  The only nice train I've been on is one between Shanghai and Beijing. Extremely clean and nice people. We shared compartment with a gentleman from the anti-piracy bureau there. He had a collection of 3000 bootlegs himself at home. But all my complains is nothing compared to what the passengers and crew have to experience on... The Bullet Train!

Sonny China, in a glorified cameo, is the captain of the super-fast bullet train. What he don't know is that a group of three men have planted a bomb underneath the train and it will explode if they gets under a certain speed! Now it's up to the control central and the police to figure out where the bomb is, where the terrorists are and save the day. But it's not that easy, of course, and soon there's just one person who knows how to disarm the bomb and he's not gonna turn himself in!

That's the basic storyline of The Bullet Train, but it has a lot more that makes it in may ways superior to American counterparts. First and most important, the characters has more layers than just being heroes and bad guys. After a while you actually feel for the main bomber (the excellent Ken Takakura), you can understand his pain and why he's doing it. This very important because then you have something else to care about and the scenes when the police is searching for him gets even more interesting and filled with tension because you're on his side during those scenes. I kinda liked him actually, and it's very far from the over-the-top scene-chewing "acting" by Dennis Hopper in the similar movie Speed (I need to see that one again actually).

Like many Japanese movies the filmmakers (this movie is produced by Toei) often used miniatures to boost the vision of the movie and Bullet Train is no except. It took me a while to realize that many of the train shots is miniatures! Sure, after a while you notice them quite clearly but they still looks great. Even if this is a disaster movie that actually lacks traditional disasters there's three sequences with exploding trains and those scenes looks awesome. There's some non-train action spliced in-between the drama also but it's the grittier, seventies style. Handheld camera, some blood and explosions.

The Bullet Train has a seriousness that you could find in slightly silly movies during the seventies and this makes it so much better. I have no time in watching movies that jokes away a good story, and The Bullet Train actually is really good with a lot of tension and thrills. There's a sequence when they need to transfer something from one speeding train to another that works so well! But it mainly lives because of the characters and the humanity in them. The DVD released by VCI is the shorter, dubbed, international version. It still works very fine and after a while you get used to the corny English voices. The original version seems to be released in the UK on DVD so I might have to get that one sooner or later.

Watch it, for the tension and for the wonderful actors!

Train Week at Ninja Dixon!

In real life I hate trains. Or being on a train for six hours feeling like an animal on the way to the butcher. But I LOVE trains in movies and therefore I will have a a train week at Ninja Dixon! 

Sometimes I even buy a movie if there's only one awesome train-sequence in it, like Sholay, Dark of the Sun, The Swarm and Inglorious Bastards. But the best movies have trains all the way through. Pity I've only released the fantastic Bollywood disaster drama The Burning Train, but I might find something else from India...

Anyway, hope you enjoy this and remember that it's #TrainWeek on Twitter! 

Ninja Dixon