Horror Express
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| German title | Horror Express |
| Original title | Pánico en el transiberiano |
| Country of production | Spain , UK |
| original language | English |
| Publishing year | 1972 |
| length | 88 (German and international version), 84 (Spain) minutes |
| Age rating | FSK 16 |
| Rod | |
| Director | Eugenio Martín |
| script |
Arnaud d'Usseau Julian Halevy |
| production | Bernard Gordon |
| music | John Cacavas |
| camera |
Alejandro Ulloa junior Teo Escamilla |
| cut | Robert Dearberg |
| occupation | |
| |
Horror Express is a Spanish-British horror film directed by Eugenio Martín in 1972 and starring Peter Cushing , Christopher Lee and Telly Savalas . The film opened in the Federal Republic of Germany on January 3, 1974.
action
China in 1906. The British anthropologist Professor Saxton discovered a frozen, humanoid being in the Himalayas , which he believes is the missing link in human evolution. He wants to take the creature stowed in a box with the Trans-Siberian Railway out of the country, to England. At the train station in Shanghai he meets his compatriot, the doctor Dr. Wells, who greets him warmly. But Saxton remains cool, apparently he doesn't want anyone to find out about his mysterious cargo. The Russian monk Pujardow who joins the crowd, a sinister type with a powerful, pitch-black beard and visually reminiscent of Rasputin , instinctively recognizes the great danger posed by the contents of the box and absolutely wants to prevent the being hidden in it that he is for deeply angry with being taken on board the train. Next to the box, a dead Chinese thief is found whose eyes are completely white. The monk sees the blind dead man and says, pointing to the box: “This is the work of the devil. Whatever it is, it's cursed. It must be destroyed ”. Prof. Saxton explains to a Russian inspector named Mirow, who asked about the contents, that there were only fossils in the box, only stones. The inspector suspects "But not more gold?" Pujardow, however, suspects much worse and is still on the platform to prove it. “Wherever Satan is, there is evil, and wherever there is evil, there is no place for the cross,” he explains, trying to draw a cross on the box with chalk. However, the box cannot be marked.
Hardly on board, a deep rumble roars from the box. Saxton opens the top hatch and you can see the mummified, frozen head of a human-like being , but it doesn't move. Dr. Shortly after the journey began, Wells bribed the baggage attendant to open the box and take a look at the contents. The young Polish Countess Petrowski and her much older husband also join the international train passengers. Also on board is the beautiful but extremely opaque Natascha. She is a spy, as it soon turns out, who is after a valuable formula from Count Petrovsky. In the meantime the baggage attendant has opened the box a little and is briefly leaving the hold. The being opens the box through a crack and frees itself. A look into his glowing red eyes also makes the train conductor blind and die. Blood runs from his whitened eyes. In the presence of Saxton, Inspector Mirow now has the box forcibly opened. But in it is no longer the fossil, "half monkey and half human, two million years old" as Saxton has assured, but the white-eyed, dead baggage attendant.
Dr. Wells dissects the dead man and opens his skull. His brain is completely smooth, without any twists. When the spy Natascha soon afterwards tampered with the train safe in order to obtain the count's presumed formula, she too is surprised by the monster and dies the same death as the previous victims. A little later, the monster also attacks Dr. Wells and tries to grab his arm. Mirow comes to his aid and shoots four bullets into the creature. The monster collapses hit and dies. But the inspector also collapses after looking fascinated into the remaining red eye. The monster transferred all of its knowledge and abilities to the inspector through eye contact, who now possesses the creature's properties and abilities. Dr. Wells and Saxton examine the creature's eye and realize that all of the creature's knowledge has been stored in its eye. You see in the eye fluid the last image the creature saw: the inspector. Wells and Saxton even see images from the distant prehistoric times, which the creature has saved - including a brontosaurus and a flying lizard, as well as images from space. The monster's abilities have meanwhile been transferred to Mirow, and he continues the killing with his red-hot eyes. Saxton finally sums up that the fossil must have only been an outer shell that was once possessed by an alien being.
The train is forcibly stopped in a winter snowy Siberian train station. There the Cossack captain Kazan, a rumbling, coarse, rough leg, climbs up and immediately takes over the helm with his men. When the two British protests about his appearance, Kazan has his people beat them with rifle butts. Then the monk arrives and warns Kazan about the devil. The Cossack captain then severely mistreated the monk. Finally, Inspector Mirow gets involved. Meanwhile, Saxton turns off the light in the train compartment and sees Mirow's eyes glow red. Kazan then rams a long knife in the back and shoots the man who is fleeing from the compartment. The dying Mirow escapes and transfers his power and abilities to the monk, who has now been loyal to him.
The monk returns to the remaining train passengers, who are now sitting in the dark, and kills one after the other with his fatal look. The Cossack soldiers shooting at him die as well as Kazan, who is killed by Pujardov's glowing red eyes. Then the monk Pujardow settled accounts with his master, Count Petrowski, who had often made fun of him. However, he spares the countess because he loves her. Prof. Saxton enters the compartment. The monk enlightened him with the knowledge of the extraterrestrial power inherent in him. "If you shoot, everything will be over," he explains to Prof. Saxton, who aims at the monk. The monk says he wants to use his power to end all wars in the world and end hunger. In a trance, Pujardow moves back and forth, and suddenly all the blind dead with the white eyes wake up again and are haunted, like zombies, by the train that races through the wintry, Siberian night. A wild scuffle begins in which Prof. Saxton saves the countess from the undead captors. The survivors flee to the rearmost car and decouple it from the rest of the train. In the meantime, an order has arrived from Moscow at the next train station stating that the railway attendants should derail the train. The railway attendants switch the points and the train with the undead falls into an abyss. The survivors, including Saxton, Wells, and the Countess, look down at the burning wreck.
Production notes
The two stars of the Hammer films , Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, met again in Horror Express . Lee had to convince his long-time film partner, whose wife had died a year earlier, to work. In addition, the US American Telly Savalas , who was about to begin his TV series fame ( Kojak ), played a typical, vigorous role. Other international Spanish-speaking actors completed the unusually prominent cast of this horror story, shot in B-movie style.
The central location of this film, the train, was built for a film about the Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa , shot immediately before (1971) by the same director , Viva Pancho Villa , in which Savalas had played the title role.
Although primarily a Spanish production, the actors speak their lyrics in English.
The studio recordings were made in Madrid , the outdoor recordings in the Puerto de Navacerrada winter sports area .
The FSK released the film from the age of 16.
A DVD edition was released under the title Death drives 1st class .
criticism
For a B-movie - costs: around 300,000 US dollars - rather unusual from the trash film sector, the film received an unusually strong and predominantly positive response internationally. However, in the country of origin Spain he was not particularly successful.
The film's large personal lexicon called Horror Express a "rather absurd (albeit effective) horror story".
The Movie & Video Guide celebrated the film: "Crackerjack horror movie, ingeniously staged and well acted by the genre's superstars".
Halliwell's Film Guide characterized the film as follows: "Rather nasty horror film which manages to keep watching despite some obvious fakery".
The lexicon of the international film praised Horror-Express : "Inventively conceived, dramatically cleverly built, skilfully staged down to the last third of the bloodbath, this is a horror film above average - with skillfully concentrated tension, a successful selection of types and stylish furnishings."
In the Handbook Films 1971-76 you can read about horror express : “Carefully made and meaningful, but nonetheless nonsensical horror film”.
Spain's guia del video-cine calls horror express a "Simpática y apreciable coproducción hispano-inglesa." It also says: "No del todo mal escrita, aceptablemente realizada y montada con cierto ritmo, por momentos hasta parece del todo inglesa"
Web links
- Horror Express in the Internet Movie Database (English)
Individual evidence
- ↑ Kay Less : The film's great personal dictionary . The actors, directors, cameramen, producers, composers, screenwriters, film architects, outfitters, costume designers, editors, sound engineers, make-up artists and special effects designers of the 20th century. Volume 8: T - Z. David Tomlinson - Theo Zwierski. Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf, Berlin 2001, ISBN 3-89602-340-3 , p. 16.
- ^ Leonard Maltin : Movie & Video Guide, 1996 edition, p. 595
- ^ Leslie Halliwell : Halliwell's Film Guide, Seventh Edition, New York 1989, p. 480
- ↑ Klaus Brüne (Red.): Lexikon des Internationale Films Volume 3, S. 1674. Reinbek near Hamburg 1987.
- ^ Films 1971-76, Handbook 9, Cologne 1977, page 137.
- ^ Carlos Aguilar: Guia del video-cine, p. 869, 4th edition. Madrid 1992
- ^ Translation: "Nice and remarkable Spanish-English co-production".
- ↑ Translation: "Not badly written, acceptable staged and cut in a certain rhythm, the film sometimes appears very English."