The myth of Pandora's box gets a makeover in Night Train. So do the film noir classics The Maltese Falcon and Kiss Me Deadly, with their murderous pursuit of priceless, mysterious objects. And the cinematic references don't end there. The electric lights aboard Night Train's doomed midnight express flicker and crackle ominously, as in any good David Lynch film, as the uncanny is about to manifest itself. And the climax, involving a villainess clinging to life in a precarious situation, comes direct from Alfred Hitchcock's Saboteur.
Moviegoers won't be familiar with Night Train because it bypassed the theaters, going direct to DVD and Blu-ray at the start of July. The market for direct-to-disc releases has grown rapidly over the past two decades. Occasionally, a brilliant gem, like John Malkovich's sophisticated thriller Ripley's Game, is inexplicably issued in that way. More often, direct to disc has become the inexpensive distribution strategy for genre pictures, especially crime, science fiction and horror. Night Train is a prime example, involving crime in a mounting cavalcade of felonies, but with the source of its story in the supernatural.
Direct-to-disc movies often feature recognizable stars, and Night Train is no exception. The cast is headed by Danny Glover as the conductor of a passenger train speeding through a blizzard to an unimagined fate. An uncommunicative and frightened passenger, clutching a package to his chest, falls dead in the club car. The car's too-curious fellow occupants, a half-cocked insurance salesman (Steve Zahn) and a fish-cold pre-med student (Leelee Sobieski), discover a weird wooden box when rifling through the dead man's parcel.
The box is impervious to sledgehammers and can't be pried open. Why all the effort? The salesman, the student and the conductor each see something of incalculable value through the grating of the box. The greedy passengers convince the initially reluctant conductor that they should somehow open it and divide the spoils. But the crime of stealing from an unknown dead man escalates soon enough to mayhem and murder. Strangely, the box's contents appear different in the eyes of every beholder. And the wooden object seems almost sentient, with a malevolent purpose of its own.
Working within a modest budget, writer-director Brian King has produced a tale of greed amplified to demonic decibels.
