When John McTiernan’s action classic Die Hard became a huge hit in 1988, it inspired a slew of lookalikes that were set in unusual locations, prompting fans and critics alike to bemoan that any given film was just “Die Hard on a [fill in location here]”. Terror Train feels like it was getting ahead of the pack and trying to do the same sort of thing, and indeed even at the time it was more than once referred to as “Halloween on a Train,” even by its own producer.

The students of Northern Illinois University are celebrating New Year’s Eve with a party. Among them is Alana Maxwell (Jamie Lee Curtis) who is less than thrilled to be there and who is dragged into a cruel practical joke involving the shy and socially awkward Kenny Hampson (Derek MacKinnon) and the corpse of a young woman stolen from the medical school. Kenny is so traumatised by the prank that he ends up in a psychiatric hospital. Three years later, the same students arrange New Year’s Eve fancy dress party aboard a train but Ed (Howard Busgang) is murdered before he can even get on, the killer stealing his Groucho Marx mask. As the students are entertained by a magician (David Copperfield) – they seem very easily impressed by his showbizzy, disco-scored stage routine – the killer wanders around the train killing with impunity, Alana comes to suspect that the killer is Kenny looking for revenge, leading to a climactic confrontation in the train’s staff car…

Terror Train was the first film to be directed by Canadian-born, British-raised director Roger Spottiswoode and one suspects that once he’d hit the big time with crowd-pleasers like Under Fire (1983), Turner & Hooch (1989), Air America (1990) and particularly the Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies (1997), he must have dreaded people like us turning up to remind him of his slasher roots. In fairness he does a pretty good job here with what he’s been given. T.Y. Drake’s script is chock-a-block with annoying and unbelievable characters, the sort of whooping, inanely grinning half-wits that usually populated these things and just when you think it can’t get any worse, the permanently furrowed brow of intense, takes-himself-too-seriously stage magician David Copperfield hoves into view.

The physics of the train layout don’t bear much scrutiny either (the killer seems to be able to move around the cramped corridors with impunity, even getting around people he’s pursuing without being noticed) but Spottiswoode still gets good mileage from the claustrophobic setting and the killer is eminently creepy behind an ever-changing series of masks, each one stolen from the previous victim. It looks marvellous too, polished well beyond its meagre budget, but with director of photography John Alcott – who had just finished working on Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) – on board, that’s almost a given. The climactic showdown between Alana and the killer is particularly well done but it’s a hard slog getting there.

There’s a tendency to remember the first wave of slasher films as veritable bloodbaths, unremitting carnage from beginning to end, but we end up blocking out or supressing the long stretches of not-much-happening between murders. Terror Train is a relatively gore-free experience, but then Halloween had been too – even stretching back to proto-slasher The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) we’re not exactly awash in the red stuff, but Terror Train feels more anaemic than most. And things were already on the change. Friday the 13th (1980) had opened in American cinemas five months before Terror Train and had been far less reticent about deploying Tom Savini’s grisly make-up effects in all their gruesome glory. This was the route that the slashers would end up taking and even on its release, Terror Train must have been looking a bit lacking.

Jamie Lee Curtis is, as you would expect, terrific but she was clearly beginning to tire of this sort of thing by now. In 1980 alone, she’d also be seen in John Carpenter’s The Fog and another Canadian slasher, Prom Night. There was still the much better Roadgames (1981) and the less-than-special Halloween II (1981) to come, but after that she would swear off horror films for many years. She’s the big draw here, the name that was going to mean the most to genre fans (at the time, Roger Ebert said that she “is to the current horror film glut what Christopher Lee was to the last one – or Boris Karloff was in the 1930s”) and most of the rest of the younger cast members are scarcely remembered, though Hart Bochner had a decent career (including turning up in the aforementioned Die Hard) and D.D. Winters would later change her name to Vanity and enjoy a successful music career under the guidance of Prince. Representing the older hands, Ben Johnson is good fun if rather under-used as the avuncular head of the train’s staff.

Of Curtis’ 1980 horrors, The Fog is the clear winner, but Terror Train is at least better than the feeble Prom Night, though that’s not saying a great deal. At best, it’s merely “OK”, a harmless enough time-waster that should have passed into the mists of time barely remembered even by the most forgiving slasher fan. But no 80s horror film, it seems, can go unmade so Terror Train‘s already paper-thin plot was recycled by director Philippe Gagnon in 2002 for an official remake which moved the setting from New Year’s Eve to Halloween, followed two months later by a sequel, Terror Train 2. Gideon Raff’s Train (2008) isn’t an official remake (though it apparently started life as one), but its plot is remarkably similar as another group of students board a train – this time somewhere in Eastern Europe – and are picked off one-by-one.