Space 1999! The one that cost more than Star Wars

 

Title: Express To Terror aka Supertrain

What Year?: 1978

Classification: Unnatural Experiment/ Anachronistic Outlier

Rating: For Crying Out Loud!!! (2/5)

 

With this review, I’ve reached the 5 reviews that I consider the minimum for a full-fledged feature. Deciding what movie I would review was very closely tied to just how much further I might go, a decision that is so far up in the air. For the moment, I decided the one to cover was one I hadn’t really known about until I started this feature. It might not have been my first choice even if I had known about it in advance, but as I learned more, I knew it was one I had to cover. Here is Express Train To Terror, the pilot of one of the most expensive and infamous science fiction shows in history.

Our story begins with a gathering of rich old men who looked dressed for Victorian England, discussing an old man’s proposal for a transcontinental railroad. It turns out that what he has in mind isn’t a rail line for the 1800s, but a fast, high-tech, two-story train capable of crossing the United States in a day and a half at 200 miles per hour (more like 70-80 for the specified destinations, but good enough if that’s including stops and detours). Moreover, the old man insists that it must be a luxury train, so when we skip forward to the opening of the train, most of the passengers prove to be rich, entitled and annoying to varying degrees. Our story soon focuses on a nervous guy convinced someone is out to kill him, as well as a possible wifebeater and his cheerful and talkative spouse who seems to be trying to make the viewer want to smack her yourself. Everyone thinks the nervous guy is just paranoid, until the wife finds an actual bomb. It’s up to the crew of the train (one of whom is tangled up in a romance with the old man’s daughter) to find the would-be assassin, and up to the audience to decide if you’d rather see them all die first! Oh, and if you’re undecided, did I mention the train has a built-in disco?

Express to Terror was the 2-hour pilot of the series Supertrain, developed for NBC by executive producer Dan Curtis following successes such as Dark Shadows and the TV movie Trilogy of Terror. The series was reportedly conceived both as a science-fictional drama and a romance/ comedy on the lines of The Love Boat, with the pilot focusing on the former. The pilot and subsequent series quickly became among the most expensive on record, with a budget of up to  $10 million for models and sets alone. The pilot was directed by Curtis, with a cast that included Patrick Collins, Keenan Wynn and Steven Lawrence as the paranoid passenger. Anyone reading this blog is most likely to recognize Fred Williamson, an athlete-turned-actor who went on to play the Vietnam vet Frost in From Dusk Till Dawn. The pilot had poor ratings, reportedly lower than a simultaneous 2-hour special of Charlie’s Angels, which quickly declined with the following episodes of the series. The series was cancelled after 9 episodes, reportedly bringing NBC close to bankruptcy. The pilot was released on VHS at least twice, by Prism in 1985 and Star Classics in 1988. No authorized disc or streaming release is confirmed or likely.

For my experiences, I heard of this one on a humor site while I was preparing to view or review other entries for this feature. I debated right up to a few days before writing this review, when I took the leap and watched it from a quite good online video apparently ripped from the 1988 video release. (After the video I had to use to review the Time Machine TV movie, a hand-cranked Fisher Price movie viewer would be a marginal improvement.) What it might me think of right off the top of my head is the various scientific and science-fictional proposals for trans-Atlantic air travel from the 1930s, up to and including floating airports in the middle of the ocean. The tech is so self-dated, even for what could presumably be known or foreseen at the time, that it becomes fascinating. It’s all the more baffling to consider it in the context of Star Wars. The network suits could have put their money into a quick, conceivably decent space opera like Battlestar Galactica or the Buck Rogers revival (aired by NBC!). Instead, they put at least as much as the $11M budget of Star Wars itself into a premise that looks as futuristic as a ride from the 1964 World’s Fair. It feels more like a “steampunk”-style alternate history than what anyone could have believed the future would be like, and what becomes disconcertingly impressive is that it manages to be entertaining, at least in stretches.

For the good points of the movie, the first act has things covered. The models, sets and effects are genuinely interesting as well as good, and there’s a seemingly intentional retro-future vibe as we see the train in operation. By comparison, most of the human characters range between dislikeable and actively annoying, but again, there is enough self-awareness for a campy sort of entertainment value. At its best moments, it feels like a disaster movie, and that brings us to a central problem: Despite all the melodrama and build-up, the train’s maiden voyage goes off almost entirely as planned, with no worse than the loss of a few windows (making for an amusing moment when the owner complains that they were billed as “indestructible”). This undoubtedly had a good deal to do with the actual cost of the models and sets, and up to a point the expectation that there would be time to do more with them in later adventures. Even with due allowances, however, the overall impression is like watching a version of The Poseidon Adventure where the ship steams into harbor ahead of schedule. It should easily have been recognized that a story centered on a train should feature a threat to the train itself, which could have been done well enough if the eventual hijinks came closer to the engine and control room.

For the bad, it is really a bit difficult to point to any one thing. There are obviously  self-dating elements, egregiously the outright references to disco. There are less explicable anachronisms, like the completely incongruous Victorian costumes of the old man (played by Wynn) and his peers. There are the multiple holes and unnecessary convolutions in the plot, plus the jarring jumps in tone as the story bounces between the central drama and fluffy romantic subplots. But the common denominator across the board is a deeper and unaccountable blindness to the political and social implications of its premise. What the story proposes is a transportation system that combines the regulatory, safety and security issues of an airplane, a subway and a nuclear power plant. It would be fascinating to consider just the psychological tension of operating such a vehicle, but this particular crew drives their atomic train through major cities like a run-down bus on a dirt road.

That brings me to the “one scene”, already referenced above. Around the 20-minute mark, the nervous guy (played by Lawrence) finds a briefcase unattended in his room, and mentions it to a steward with no particular concern. A scene or so later, the steward brings it back, and he shows it to his friend and the chatty wife, played by the late Char Fontane, whose credits include the direct-to-video Punisher. They continue to examine the unattended luggage, still unconcerned at something that would by now have a bomb squad carefully approaching if it had been found in an ordinary train station. Then the clutzy lady bumps the briefcase, and it falls right off the train. The steward merely muses, “We don’t have to worry about that anymore,” and everyone laughs as expected. Then, almost as an afterthought, the camera focuses on the briefcase, which explodes on the track. As the others move on, the wife pauses… and frowns.

In closing, I feel like the one thing left to address is why I haven’t given this the lowest rating, particularly after doing just that to the TV Spider Man movie. I will admit that after viewing this, I seriously debated whether I was too hard on that one, and for that matter the Ewoks movies. I can allow that Spider Man isn’t much worse than this one, but for me personally, its flaws are far more irritating, above all because of how badly it fell short of its potential. By comparison, this one probably does about as well as could be expected with an already clearly outdated premise, with just enough sincerity to capture a little of the nostalgia that still clings to the days of the Transcontinental Railroad and the Orient Express. Most importantly, it does what a pilot is supposed to do, testing the idea and execution before the commitment to a series, and beyond the sheer sunk cost that went into it, it can’t be blamed for the fact that those involved made what now seems obviously the wrong decision. At the end of the day, if you’re looking for “so bad it’s good”, this is one vehicle that really delivers the goods.