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Dis­cov­er the wild ride of this Ham­mer-esque 70s Euro-horror

11 Feb 2019

Words by Anton Bitel

Bearded man with glowing red eyes, wearing dark clothing, in a dark, shadowy environment.
Bearded man with glowing red eyes, wearing dark clothing, in a dark, shadowy environment.
Euge­nio Martín’s Hor­ror Express is like a loco­mo­tive mash-up of The Thing and Mur­der on the Ori­ent Express.

The novel­la Who Goes There?’, pub­lished in 1934 by John W Camp­bell Jr under his pen name Don A Stew­art, has left a con­sid­er­able mark on cin­e­ma. First there was Chris­t­ian Nyby’s loose adap­ta­tion, The Thing From Anoth­er World, and then John Carpenter’s much clos­er ver­sion, The Thing, which has grad­u­al­ly come to be regard­ed as one of the most impor­tant and influ­en­tial sci-fi/hor­ror films of all time. Yet in 1972 came Hor­ror Express, which despite being set on the Trans-Siber­ian Express in 1906 rather than on a con­tem­po­rary research base in Antarc­ti­ca, clear­ly takes its cue from Campbell’s writing.

Direct­ed by Span­ish genre jour­ney­man Euge­nio Martín, and reusing train sets and mod­els made for Martín’s spaghet­ti west­ern Pan­cho Vil­la from the same year, Hor­ror Express is a sto­ry of two rivals from the British Roy­al Geo­log­i­cal Soci­ety who must work togeth­er when the ancient ape-like miss­ing link’ found frozen in a Manchuri­an cave by one of them comes back to life while being trans­port­ed to Eng­land for study.

The crea­ture is famil­iar enough from Who Goes There?’: a body-hop­ping alien that is play­ing a very long game in seek­ing to advance par­a­sit­i­cal­ly up Earth’s evo­lu­tion­ary lad­der until it can build a space craft to return it home, and that is more than hap­py to inhab­it or kill the humans through whom it eas­i­ly moves unde­tect­ed. At the same time, these deaths on a train filled with multi­na­tion­al pas­sen­gers is more sug­ges­tive of Agatha Christie’s Mur­der on the Ori­ent Express’, while the cast­ing of Christo­pher Lee and Peter Cush­ing, as heroes Pro­fes­sor Sir Alexan­der Sax­ton and Dr Wells respec­tive­ly, lends it the feel of a Ham­mer production.

With its loco­mo­tive-load of Pol­ish nobil­i­ty (Sil­via Tor­tosa, George Rigaud), a Rasputin-like mad monk (Alber­to de Men­doza), a dry-humoured bac­te­ri­ol­o­gist (Alice Rein­heart), a Russ­ian police inspec­tor (Julio Peña), a chess-play­ing engi­neer (Ángel del Pozo), an inter­na­tion­al spy (Hel­ga Liné), and a cig­ar-chomp­ing, whip-wield­ing Cap­tain (Tel­ly Savalas) and his band of Cos­sacks, there is, putting it mild­ly, a lot to take on board.

Bar­relling along with the pace of a speed­ing train, Hor­ror Express looks back not entire­ly nos­tal­gi­cal­ly at British impe­ri­al­ist val­ues from the turn of the cen­tu­ry, when the world was a trea­sure trove for civilised-seem­ing Eng­lish adven­tur­ers to plun­der, and their finds were val­ued over the lives of for­eign locals. These atti­tudes are embod­ied by arro­gant, aloof, rapa­cious Sax­ton, who, as the film’s nar­ra­tor, invites us from the out­set to form a judg­ment’ of his dubi­ous con­duct, while the benign Wells antic­i­pates a kind­lier, less colo­nial rela­tion­ship for Britain with the rest of the world.

When these men end up work­ing togeth­er as a team, we can see reflect­ed in the com­bi­na­tion of their two very dif­fer­ent char­ac­ters all the con­tra­dic­tions in Britain’s 20th-cen­tu­ry for­eign pol­i­cy. The alien is at first oppor­tunis­tic but even­tu­al­ly strate­gic in its choice of human tar­gets for takeover, and one of the film’s most deli­cious ironies is that for all the cul­tur­al and intel­lec­tu­al supe­ri­or­i­ty that Sax­ton likes to project, his mind is far less attrac­tive to the evo­lu­tion-leap­ing alien than that of Rigaud’s scientist.

The oth­er ten­sion in Hor­ror Express is between reli­gion and sci­ence, the for­mer cham­pi­oned by de Mendoza’s wide-eyed zealot Father Pujar­dov, the lat­ter by prac­ti­cal­ly every­one else. A reli­gious fun­da­men­tal­ist who rejects the the­o­ry of evo­lu­tion, Pujar­dov nat­u­ral­ly regards the red-eyed, brain-suck­ing alien as Lucifer fall­en to Earth. Yet while he nev­er aban­dons this inter­pre­ta­tive frame, Pujar­dov is sur­pris­ing­ly quick, once he sees that evil’ is in the ascen­dant, to change sides and make him­self a ser­vant to the unholy one’.

Curi­ous­ly, the alter­na­tive, ratio­nal­ist view of what’s going on is nev­er quite ful­ly endorsed by the film itself. Sax­ton and Wells’ deter­mined­ly empir­i­cal approach to solv­ing the mys­ter­ies on board the train may get them all the way to the end of the line, but it does not quite explain the effect that the alien’s pres­ence seems to have on a reli­gious icon in the Pol­ish couple’s quar­ters. It is some­thing of a mixed mes­sage, but per­haps that is only to be expect­ed in a film so dri­ven by the rat­tle and clank of dif­fer­ent cul­tures, ide­olo­gies and gen­res clash­ing togeth­er. It’s a fun ride while it lasts, even if few of its images are like­ly to remain imprint­ed on your retina.

Hor­ror Express is released by Arrow on Blu-ray in a brand new 2K ver­sion from orig­i­nal film ele­ments on 11 February.

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