cult film freak: PETER CUSHING AND CHRISTOPHER LEE RIDING 'HORROR EXPRESS'

Helga Liné painted into HORROR EXPRESS/PÁNICO EN EL TRANSIBERIANO Year: 1972 Rating: ****

In-between the original THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD and John Carpenter's remake THE THING is HORROR EXPRESS, initially seeming like another period-piece Hammer film starring Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing — when it's really a low-budget Spanish studio's adaptation of John W. Campbell's THING-based short story Who Goes There?

Beginning with Lee's brooding archeologist, having discovered a man-ape fossil that he cages into the titular snowbound train... joined by Cushing's affable surgeon, part of the crowded coach including beautiful countess Silvia Tortosa; psychotic monk Alberto de Mendoza; seductive stowaway Helga Liné; Miss Marples-style snoop Alice Reinheart; and Julio Peña as the intense onboard lawman who, with a lean build and brooding mustache, looks way too similar to Christopher Lee...

From HORROR EXPRESS

So when the creature's hypnotic bright red eyes turns its victims into likewise bloodletting killers, eventually deeply rooted inside this ferociously possessed inspector, it's confusing when Lee's grim tomb-raider arrives to stop his doppelganger... but soon that spooky-looking, Rasputin-inspired monk carries on the terrifying chain-reacting murders, formidably-effective even during what's the worst sequences, again because of casting...

When a colorfully vivacious Telly Savalas randomly turns up, seeming like a Russian version of Kojak, questioning the paranoid passengers as if the story suddenly belonged entirely to him: an unnecessary distraction in what's an otherwise fully entertaining hybrid of pulpy science-fiction and body-count horror (with Victorian-plush interiors and nifty train-model exteriors) while never losing the suspenseful investigatory buildup, even when inevitably morphing into a kind of last-minute anything-goes zombie-attack action/adventure.