Let's just get through this thing as quickly as possible. First of, this movie is
cack. Shite, crap, dreck, whatever your preferred term is. The story makes absolutely
no friggen sense whatsoever. A nice old man is on a train, his horny young
assistant is getting it on with a girl in the sleeping car, which somehow causes
a train wreck with many fatalities. This causes the kindly old gent to become
a sexual sadist who shows his regret over the loss of life by murdering young
woman who had nothing to do with the crash. WHAT!? I suppose they were trying
to rip-off ‘Friday the 13‘, but at least the psychosis of Mrs. Voorhees had
some rational psychological basis. (kinda)
His wife finds out about his new hobby, and kills him, which traps his
mutilated ghost inside a futon (!) so that he can kill or possess whoever sleeps
on it. Wow! A double plagiarization! You don’t see that very often!
Knowing that “The Mister’s” ghost haunts the train compartment of doom, his
supposedly decent wife rents it out to a string of unfortunate saps. (I don’t
really remember, but I think that it is the same train involved in the crash,
which means that they basically hosed out the blood and turned a deadly crash
site into crappy apartments. Makes about as much sense as recycling the
battleship Arizona into Dr. Pepper® cans.)
The acting is brain shatteringly awful. Keep in mind I’m not talking about
80’s slasher “I’ll show my tits, so they hired me!” awful, nor even “My Dad is
an investor.” awful. Not even “Uwe Boll told me I have no future in motion
pictures.” awful. More like “I was thrown out of community theater, and the
local public access station claims they lost my demo tape in a fire.” awful.
The screenplay for this film can be used to clear vermin out of attics or
basements, and would be very useful for making Guantanamo Bay detainees talk.
(I’m pretty sure it’s use would constitute a violation of the Geneva
convention, but hey, when has that ever stopped us!) It seems to have been
compiled from the figurative carpet remnants and bulk deli meat loaf ends of
50,000 discarded sitcoms scripts. Listening to this crap is brutal. The dialogue
is oddly reminiscent of a sheltered 13 year-old boy’s (or for that matter Woody
Allen’s) concept of how witty, urbane people should speak. The lame quips,
asinine one-liners, and insipid put-downs fly faster than a gross of custard
pies at Moe Howard’s bar mitzvah. ( Or bad similes in one of my reviews.) The
characters spouting this junk are as worthless as the excrement coming out of
their mouths. They range from soulless couch-fodder to grating harpies, with a
handful of forgettable non-entities taking up the space in between.
Well, it is a monster movie, so let's move from the absurd to the merely
banal, and ask, are the special effects any good? “The Mister” does have some
effective make-up, but it’s completely lifted from Freddy Krueger. (As is his
pitiful shticky dialogue. Even a NOES 5 era Freddy would be embarrassed to spout
such gibberish.) Besides, they couch the monster (no pun intended, alright, pun
intended J ) in shadow during the, oh, three minutes he
actually appears in the film. And for God’s sake, his picture is on the cover of
the vhs box! Go look at the picture for this movie on IMDB
. There! You’ve
just seen the best part of the film! No rental necessary.
How did MST3000 ever miss this one?