Panico en el Transiberiano
Entry updated 16 September 2021. Tagged: Film.
Film (1972; vt Horror Express; vt Panic on the Trans-Siberian Express). Granada/Benmar. Directed by Eugenio Martin. Written by Arnaud d'Usseau, Julian Halevey. Cast includes Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee and Telly Savalas. 90 minutes, cut to 88 minutes. Colour.
In this Spanish/UK coproduction the year is 1906. The body of an apparent "missing link", dug up in China by an anthropologist (Lee), comes to life on the Trans-Siberian Express and turns out to be an Alien who crash-landed on Earth aeons ago. He has the power to transfer his personality from one body to another (see Identity Transfer), and also to absorb people's personalities. The film is slick and amusing, and moves so fast that there is little time to dwell on its absurdities. It came into being only because the producer bought two model trains that had been used in the epic Nicholas and Alexandra (1971) and had a script written around them. The direction is in routine exploitation-movie style, but the lively script has some surprising turns. [JB/PN]
further reading
- John Connolly. Horror Express (Hornsea, East Yorkshire: PS Publishing, 2018) [nonfiction: in the publisher's Midnight Movie Monograph series: hb/Neil Snowdon and David Chatton Barker]
links
previous versions of this entry