Horror Express (DVD)

Synopsis

In the early 1900s, anthropologist Alexander Saxton (Christopher Lee) unearths in China what he believes to be the scientific find of the new century: the centuries-old frozen body of a gigantic ape-like man, a veritable "missing link." Booking a ticket on the train back to Europe with his crated-up, but still very healthy discovery, he joins an international group of passengers on a nightmarish adventure aboard the Horror Express.

Even before the train embarks, things are amiss: a theif who tries to pick the lock on the monster's box is discovered stone-dead, his eyes turned completely white like two poached eggs. After the creature awakens and begins knocking off other travelers, Saxton is eventually forced to enlist the help of rival scientist Dr. Wells (Peter Cushing). The two Bristish doctors soon begin a cat-and-mouse game of discovery, learning bits of information about the creature - which turns out to be a non-corporeal alien intelligence only temporarily inhabiting the ape-man - and trying to stop its bloddy rampage through the train as it steals enough information from the brains of various passengers to enable it to return home.

Horror Express is a relentlessly entertaining cult favorite and by far the best 1970s pairing of genre stalwarts Cushing and Lee, this time around not as enemies (as in their Hammer Dracula pictures), but as reluctant comrades forced to combat a malign, extraterrestrial, and almost diabolical creature bent on human destruction.