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3 hours ago
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Every day is a good day to reacquaint ourselves with Horror Express, the 1972 Spanish-British co-production that sees scream kings Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing battling an ancient evil on board a choo-choo train. Need I say more?
Prof Saxton (Christopher Lee) unearths a 2 million-year-old iceman while on an expedition to the Manchurian wilderness. It’s a nightmare trying to transport it back to the UK: his reservation on the Trans-Siberian Express gets messed up and he has to suffer the indignity of sharing a cabin with his professional rival Dr Wells (Peter Cushing). And to top it off, the iceman thaws out and starts melting passengers’ eyeballs.
Through the course of their research, Saxton and Wells discover the iceman is in fact an awakened alien entity who has been around since the dawn of time, able to transfer its consciousness into any host it chooses – taking loose inspiration from John W Campbell’s novella Who Goes There, which also inspired John Carpenter’s The Thing.
The inclusion of TV hardman Telly Savalas as a Cossack officer, on board to troubleshoot the locomotive terror, is a piece of third-act genius which ups the stakes nicely. Also among the passengers are the glamorous Countess Irina Petrovski (Silvia Tortosa) and her creepy religious consul, Father Pujardov (Alberto de Mendoza), who blames every mishap on Satan. (Don’t they all?)
Horror Express is one of the 20-odd movies the legendary Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing made together. But unlike their roles with legacy horror production house Hammer such as Dracula and Van Helsing, which frequently saw them as adversaries, Horror Express unites them against a common foe.
There remains, of course, a touch of their antagonistic frisson. Professional rivalry simmers as Wells passive-aggressively surmises Saxton’s career as “[dabbling] in fossils and bones”. Saxton is all tweed and moustache and no messing about; if he ever had a sense of humour, he left it back on the frozen Manchurian wastelands. Wells is far more laid back, with the air of a man who knows he’s the smartest person in the room. He’s not above bribing a porter for a peek at Saxton’s goods, yet both men step up when the iceman goes on a rampage. Call it chivalry at its finest.
The iceman is a delightfully weird and grotty creation. Resembling a cross between a rotting Lucio Fulci zombie and a classic Doctor Who fiend, it lurches about the shadows with burning crimson eyes, moth-eaten fur and a desiccated, skull-like grimace. It absorbs its victims’ brains through their eyes and steals their memories.
When it is suggested that anyone on board could be the alien, Wells indignantly (and hilariously) retorts, “Monster? We’re British, you know.” If this sentence came from anyone else it would push the bile to the back of my throat. But uttered by the kindly Cushing, the mild patriotism feels benign and endearingly polite, like he’s going to bring me a cup of tea.
Horror Express might not have a tonne of competition as far as the locomotive creature feature goes – but even if it did, it would still reign supreme. What’s better than seeing two buttoned-down gents give a devilish beast the stiff upper lip? It’s as fun now as it was 53 years ago – almost as though it was kept on ice.
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Horror Express is available to stream on Tubi in Australia, BBC iPlayer in the UK and Roku in the US. For more recommendations of what to stream in Australia, click here
