Icarus File No. 24: Express to Terror (dir by Dan Curtis)

Posted on October 1, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

The year was 1979 and Fred Silverman, the president of NBC, had an idea.

How about a television series in which each week’s episode would depict a different group of passengers going on a trip? The passengers would all be dealing with their own stories, some of which would be dramatic and some of which would be humorous. With any luck, some of them might even fall in love over the course of their journey!

To keep the audience interested, the show would also feature a cast of regular characters, the crew. Edward Andrews would play the captain, a sensible and by-the-book type. Robert Alda played Doc, the doctor who was also a bon vivant. Patrick Collins was the goofy purser. Nita Talbot played Rose, the perky director of entertainment. Michael DeLano was the bartender who always had the best advice for the passengers….

Does this sound familiar?

If you think that it sounds like Fred Silverman just ripped off The Love Boat …. well, you’re wrong. The Love Boat took place on a boat. Supertrain took place on a train.

At the time that Supertrain went into production, it was the most expensive television production of all time. Before the pilot film was even shot, NBC had spent ten million dollars on the Supertrain sets. Not only was a fake train built but two models were also constructed for the shots of the train moving through the countryside. At the time, the assumption was that the costs would be easily covered by the money that NBC stood to make from broadcasting the 1980 Summer Olympics. Unfortunately, Jimmy Carter decided that the U.S. would be boycotting the Olympics as a way to protest Russia’s invasion of Afghanistan. The only thing that kept NBC from going bankrupt was that the BBC was apparently run by someone even more incompetent than Fred Silverman. The BBC paid $25,oo per episode for the rights to air Supertrain in the UK. Supertrain proved to be such a disaster that the BBC never actually aired the episodes that they had purchased.

1979’s Express to Terror was the pilot to Supertrain. (It was later released in some territories as a stand-alone film.) Directed by horror impresario Dan Curtis (who was also brought in to produce the series), Express to Terror opens with an apparently drunk Keenan Wynn playing the role of railway baron Winfield Root. Winfield loudly announces to a group of nervous investors that he has created ” an atom-powered steam turbine machine capable of crossing this country in 36 hours!” A few months later, Supertrain sets off from New York to Los Angeles.

The main thing that one notices about the train is that it’s incredibly tacky. For all the money that Winfield Root (not to mention NBC) poured into the thing, it looks awful. The cabins are bland and also seem to be constantly shaking as the train rumbles over its tracks. Whereas The Love Boat featured glorious shots of passengers enjoying themselves on an open-air deck, Express to Terror features a lot of shots of passengers trying to squeeze their way through narrow and crowded hallways. There’s a disco car, which sounds like fun but actually looks like a prom being held in a locker room. There’s a swimming pool but you can’t really lay out by it because it’s on a train. Winfield is among the passengers and he continually refers to the train as being “Supertrain” in conversation, which just sounds dumb. “The next person who stops Supertrain,” he announces “will be walking to L.A!”

The main drama features Steve Lawrence as Mike Post, a Hollywood agent with a gambling problem who thinks that someone on the train is trying to kill him. Actually, the assassin is after a different Mike Post (Don Stroud) but that Mike Post is a criminal who, after entering the witness protection program, changed his name to Jack Fisk. The criminal Post is hoping that the agent Post will be killed by mistake. The criminal Mike Post has a girlfriend named Cindy (Char Fontane) who falls in love with the agent Mike Post. Fred Williamson appears as a football player-turned-assassin. George Hamilton plays a Hollywood executive. Don Meredith is the alcoholic best friend of the agent Mike Post. Stella Stevens is on the train as a diva. So is Vicki Lawrence, playing a naive innocent.

Express to Terror tries to mix comedy and drama but it doesn’t really work because the “Good” Mike Post doesn’t really seem to be worth all the trouble. Steve Lawrence gives a mind-numbingly bad performance in the role and, as a result, “Good” Mike Post really isn’t any more sympathetic than “Bad” Mike Post. The main problem is that “Good” Mike Post comes across as being a coward and there’s only so much time that you can watch a coward act cowardly before you lose sympathy for him. Being scared is one thing. Being so dumb that accidentally gets your fingerprints on a knife that’s just been used to kill a man is another thing.

As for the members of the crew — the captain, the doctor, the bartender, and such, they take a back seat to the drama of the two Mike Posts. It’s a bit odd because no one on the train — not even Winfield Root — seems to be that upset by the fact that one of their passengers is murdered while the train is going through a tunnel. You would think that everyone would be worried about the future of Supertrain at that point. A murder is not good for publicity but Winfield Root is oddly unconcerned about it. I swear, light rail people are almost as heartless as bicyclists!

Of course, the worst thing about Express to Terror is that it promises terror but it doesn’t deliver. When I see a the word “terror” in a film directed by Dan Curtis, I expect a little terror! Other than Steve Lawrence’s overacting, there really wasn’t anything particularly terrifying about Express to Terror.

As for Supertrain, it ran for nine episodes and was promptly canceled. Fred Silverman left NBC and spent the rest of his career as an independent producer. Supertrain’s tracks got too close to the sun and they nearly took down a network.

Previous Icarus Files:

Commando (1985, directed by Mark L. Lester)

Posted on July 30, 2025 by Jedadiah Leland

John Matrix (Arnold Schwarzenegger) is a former colonel in the U.S. Amy Special Forces. He was one of the best at what he did but he’s now retired from all that and lives in the mountains of California with his young daughter, Jenny (Alyssa Milano). When Capt Bennett (Vernon Wells), Martix’s former comrade-in-arms, kidnaps Jenny, Matrix is told that he has 11 hours to assassinate the leader of the country of Val Verde so that General Arius (Dan Hedaya) can launch a coup. Knowing that the bad guys are planning on killing both him and Jenny no matter what he does, Matrix instead takes out Arius’s men as he makes his way to where Jenny is being held captive.

Commando is one of my favorite Schwarzenegger films. It has some of the best one-liners (“I like you, Sully, I kill you last,”), some of the best character actors (Sully is played by David Patrick Kelly), and also one of Schwarzenegger’s best performances. In Commando, Schwarzenegger shows that he’s willing to poke fun at himself, which was something that set him apart from many of the action heroes of the 80s. (Stallone eventually learned how to poke fun at himself but it took a very long time.) At his California home, Matrix chops down and carries a tree without breaking a sweat. During a chase through a mall, Matrix easily lifts up a phone booth. Matrix may be trying to save the life of his daughter but he still takes the time to come up with one-liners and fall in love with flight attendant Cindy (Rae Dawn Chong). Commando is essentially just a big comic book brought to life and Schwarzenegger understands that and gives a very knowing, self-aware performance. Director Mark Lester wastes no time getting to the action and the result is one of the most entertaining action films of the 80s.

Believe it or not, Commando was originally envisioned as being a Gene Simmons picture. When the KISS frontman turned down the film, the script was rewritten for Arnold Schwarzenegger. Schwarzenegger made this film after The Terminator and it was another box office success. As for Gene Simmons, he would have to wait for Runaway to make his action debut.

Top Of the World (1997, directed by Sidney J. Furie)

Posted on February 13, 2025 by Jedadiah Leland

Ray Mercer (Peter Weller) has just gotten out of prison and already, he and his wife Rebecca (Tia Carrere) are heading to Nevada for a quicky divorce. However, a stopover in Las Vegas leads to Ray having a run of luck in a casino owned by Charles Atlas (Dennis Hopper). Ray and Rebecca start to reconsider their divorce but their reconciliation is temporarily put on hold when the casino is robbed by a bunch of thieves led by Martin Kove. Because of Ray’s criminal history, the police (led by David Alan Grier) consider Ray to be the number one suspect. Ray and Rebecca try to escape from the casino and clear Ray’s name, leading to a night on nonstop action and an explosive climax at the Hoover dam.

One thing that you can say about Top of the World is that it certainly isn’t boring. The action starts earlier and lasts nonstop until the end of the movie. No sooner has Ray escaped from one scrape than he finds himself in another. Despite the low-budget, the action scenes are often spectacularly staged and exciting to watch. Another thing that you can say about Top of the World is that, for a B-movie, it certainly has a packed cast. Along with Weller, Carrere, Hopper, Grier, and Kove, the movie also finds room for Peter Coyote, Joe Pantoliano, Ed Lauter, Gavan O’Herlihy, Eddie Mekka, Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, and even Larry Manetti of Magnum P.I. fame. This movie paid off a lot of mortgages and probably funded more than a few vacations.

One thing you can’t say about Top of the World is that it makes any sense. It doesn’t. There are so many holes in the plot that you could fly a helicopter through them and that’s exactly what this film does. But with the nonstop action and the entertaining cast, most people won’t mind. I certainly didn’t!

The TSL’s Grindhouse: Private Wars (dir by John Weidner)

Posted on August 17, 2020 by Lisa Marie Bowman

The 1993 action film, Private Wars, tells the story of a neighborhood, a big evil businessman, and one drunk private investigator who likes to shoot things.

The big evil businessman is Alexander Winters (played by Stuart Whitman). Winters is so evil that he probably spends at least three hours every night practicing his smirk. He’s the type who will plot someone’s death and then laugh about it just to make sure that it’s understood that he’s totally evil. Winters wants to build a new business complex but there’s a neighborhood sitting on the land that he wants to use and no one’s willing to move.

However, Winters has a plan to bring about change. If the people in the neighborhood won’t move voluntarily, he’ll just make them flee for their lives. Winters pays off some local gangs to create trouble in the neighborhood. Soon, stores are exploding and windows are getting broken and obscene graffiti is showing up on walls. Everyone in the neighborhood keeps going to the community center and debating what to do. You have to wonder why the gangs are wasting their time vandalizing storefronts when they could have just blown up the community center and taken out every who was in their way.

Eventually, the community decides to hire someone to teach them how to defend themselves. After auditioning a series of ninjas and other wannabe soldiers of fortune, the community hires Jack Manning (Steve Railsback). Why do they hire Jack Manning? Well, he’s a friend of one of the community leaders. He’s also an alcoholic who shoots his car whenever the engine starts giving him trouble. How exactly anyone could look at Jack — who is not only almost always drunk but also a bit on the short and scrawny side — and think that he could protect the neighborhood is an interesting question that the film doesn’t really explore.

Anyway, the community is soon fighting back, which turns out to be a lot easier than anyone imagined. Eventually, Jack ends up in jail as a result of Winters’s corruption but fortunately, it’s while in jail that Jack meets a few guys who all have mullets and who all come back to the neighborhood to help Jack out when a bunch of ninjas try to take over the streets. Winters may have ninjas but Jack has a bunch of petty criminals who look they’re all heading to a hockey game in Toronto. It’s a fair fight.

To be honest, the main thing that I will always remember about Private Wars was just how unnecessary Jack eventually turned out to be. For all the money that he was apparently being paid, he really doesn’t do much. I guess he does teach people in the neighborhood the techniques of self-defense but the film is so haphazardly edited that it’s hard to be sure of that. It’s entirely possible that everyone already knew how to fight but they were just hoping Jack would do it for them. Watching the film, it’s easy to get the feeling that the folks in the community center took one look at Jack and said, “Well, shit …. I guess we gotta do this ourselves.” Even the final confrontation between Jack and Winters is resolved by a third character. Imagine Roadhouse if Patrick Swayze spent the whole movie sitting at the bar and you have an idea what Private Wars is like.

Private Wars is really silly but, possibly for that very reason, it’s also occasionally fun in its own stupid way. If nothing else, Stuart Whitman and Steve Railsback appeared to be enjoying themselves. The movie’s on YouTube. I watched it last Monday as a part of the #MondayActionMovie live tweet and I enjoyed myself.

Cinemax Friday: Not Of This Earth (1988, directed by Jim Wynorski)

Posted on August 14, 2020 by Jedadiah Leland

Since today is director Jim Wynorski’s birthday, I want to review one of his early films.

A remake of the Roger Corman classic, Wynorksi’s Not Of This Earth stars Traci Lords as Nadine Story, a nurse who works in the office of Dr. Rochelle (Ace Mask) and who has a boyfriend named Harry (Roger Lodge) who is also a cop. (The leads to jokes like, “Harry called. He said he left his nightstick with you last night.”) Dr. Rochelle’s main patient is the mysterious Mr. Johnson (Arthur Roberts), who dresses in all black, always wears sunglasses, and who needs frequent blood transfusions. When Dr. Rochelle takes a look at Mr. Johnson’s blood, he sees that Mr. Johnson has a strange blood disease that has apparently never been discovered before. Dr. Rochelle sends Nadine over to work at Mr. Johnson’s home as his private nurse. Of course, Mr. Johnson is not of this Earth. His planet is dying and, as Nadine discovers, he is on Earth to search for a new supply of blood.

Wynorski’s version of Not Of This Earth follows the exact same plot of the Corman original, right down to having a door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman fall victim to the alien’s bloodlust. (In the original, the salesman was played by Dick Miller. In the remake, he’s played by Michael Delano. Miller does not even get a cameo in the remake of Not of this Earth, which is surprising considering it was still a Corman production and Wynorski previously cast Miller in Chopping Mall.) They’re both enjoyable movies, especially if you’re in the mood for something that won’t require much thought. The main difference between the the two versions of Not of this Earth is that the Wynorski version features a lot more nudity and that it makes no pretense towards being anything other than a comedy.

This was Traci Lords’s first role in a non-adult film and she knocks it out of the park. The scandal surrounding her adult film career has always overshadowed the fact that, for all of her notoriety, Traci Lords was actually a pretty good actress who could handle comedy. While the deliberately campy humor in Not of this Earth is no one’s definition of subtle, Lords shows good comedic timing and, most importantly, she delivers her lines with a straight face and without winking at the audience.

Wynorski later said that the movie was so popular on video that he was able to buy a house with his share of the profits. Not of this Earth is a classic Wynorski production, featuring everything that made Jim Wynorski a late-night cable and direct-to-video favorite in the 90s.