Worth Mentioning - Not Wallowing in the Past

We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning. 

Cody watches another Christmas movie and a New Year movie.

TERROR TRAIN 2 (2022)

Not content with just producing a remake of the ‘80s slasher Terror Train, the Tubi streaming service had the remake shot back-to-back with a sequel that was released just a couple months later. While the original Terror Train had been set on New Year’s Eve, the remake moved the setting to Halloween – so the New Year’s Eve setting could be used for the sequel!

Directed by Philippe Gagnon from a screenplay by Ian Carpenter and Aaron Martin, the same creative team that was behind the Terror Train remake, Terror Train 2 picks up fourteen months after the events of its predecessor, with heroine Alana (Robyn Alomar) struggling to carry on with her life after she faced off with a slasher – and lost several friends – during an excursion train ride. Her roommate Claudia (Nia Roam) suggests that Alana should face her fears by attending a New Years party on the same train the murders occurred on, an event that has been organized by fellow survivor The Prez (Dakota Jamal Wellman) but hijacked by another pair of survivors, Pet (Romy Weltman) and Merry (Tori Barban), who have a major following on an app for true crime enthusiast. So the train ends up being occupied by a whole bunch of “murder fiends” who find the idea of being on “the terror train” to be disturbingly entertaining. The Magician (Tim Rozon) is back for another ride, as is railroad employee Sadie (Nadine Bhabha)... and as soon as the train is rolling, the murders have resumed.

Despite the fact that the previous movie set up the possibility that the killer could still be alive, Terror Train 2 is still a murder mystery. Is the killer back, or has one of the passengers turned homicidal? We’re left to try to solve the mystery along with Alana and the fellow survivors. And I’ll be honest, I wasn’t able to figure out exactly what was going on.

I thought the Terror Train remake was fine. I described it as being “harmlessly bland”. It didn’t gather a lot of fans, and the existence of Terror Train 2 seems to have been largely ignored over the year since its release. But I thought this one was a fine slasher as well, and in some ways more interesting than the movie it follows. After all, that movie was basically just the original movie all over again, but a lesser version of it. This time around the writers had to do something a little different.

I was also very entertained by the performance Romy Weltman turned in as Pet. The character didn’t make much of an impression on me in the remake, but she steals the show this time around. Weltman alone was enough to make Terror Train 2 worth watching, as far as I’m concerned.

SURVIVING CHRISTMAS (2004)

Surviving Christmas is, like Four Christmases and Just Friends, a film that I caught on the big screen during its initial theatrical release, and like those other movies, it’s a film that I may have never watched again after seeing it in the theatre. In all three of these cases, I should have rewatched them sooner, because I really enjoyed going back to them after so many years.

Directed by Mike Mitchell and written by Deborah Kaplan, Harry Elfont, Jennifer Ventimilia, and Joshua Sternin, this one stars Ben Affleck as advertising executive Drew Latham, who makes the mistake of asking his girlfriend Missy (Jennifer Morrison) to spend Christmas with him in Fiji. Appalled that he isn’t family oriented – that he wouldn’t even think of introducing her to his family – Missy dumps him. So Drew takes the advice of Missy’s therapist (played, very briefly, by Stephen Root) and goes to his childhood home to burn a list of his grievances, under the belief that this will be psychologically freeing for him. Instead, Drew is spotted burning something in the front lawn of the home by its new owner Tom Valco (James Gandolfini), who smashes him in the head with a snow shovel for trespassing.

Drew has been sort of douche up to that point in the film, but when he regains consciousness, Affleck proceeds to play him in a rather bizarre way for a large portion of the remaining running time... and I don’t think we were supposed to get the idea that getting hit with the shovel knocked a screw loose in his mind, but he does start acting really goofy in a way that’s likely to make viewers question his sanity. Whatever the thought process behind the performance was, it does work for the nuttiness that follows. When Drew wakes up, he presents the Valcos – the rest of the family being Tom’s wife Christine (Catherine O’Hara), their teenage son Brian (Josh Zuckerman), and their disapproving twenty-something daughter Alicia (Christina Applegate) – with a deal. If they pretend to be his family over the Christmas holidays, he will pay them $200,000. That’s a deal Tom can’t decline. Not even when Drew hires a local theater actor (Bill Macy) to come in and play his grandfather. Or Doo-Dah.

A bunch of Yuletide wackiness ensues – and while the whole thing is absurd, there are some laughs to be found along the way, and the movie has a good heart at the center of it all. Surviving Christmas was poorly reviewed when it was released, it was a box office failure and has faded into obscurity. But it really wouldn’t be a bad movie to include in the annual Christmas viewing rotation. Some questionable choices aside, the great cast that Mitchell assembled did solid work in their roles and made this into a pleasant viewing experience.