Christopher Lee plays an anthropologist who discovers a frozen corpse that he dates as being two million years old. He pops it into a box and has it placed aboard a Trans-Siberian Express. As luck would have it, Peter Cushing is on the same train. Yay. But bad luck wants a piece of the action, too, and after a mysterious death happens the contents of Lee's find come under suspicion.
A thundering locomotive is an unusual setting for a 70s horror, and there's enough variety in the character types onboard to keep it interesting. The second half is where it gets really fascinating.
On the downside, it feels much too thrown together at times, often ruining the atmosphere that was present. A better edit would've helped the scoring.
3 all-white eyes out of 5
2 comments:
Did you know this was based on the same source material as John Carpenter's The Thing? It's the reason why I decided to check it out. I think the train was a way of isolating the characters. It's interesting to see the creature get a voice in this adaptation as opposed to just pure survival in The Thing. Though I was put off by the monk and found Terry Savalas' character to be pointless. 3 glowing red eyes out of 5.
I didn't know. It was Lee and Cushing that appealed to me. But now you mention it, and from what little I can actually remember [spoilers ahead] I can see a few similarities with the other filmed versions, what with the frozen antagonist and the changing host.
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