Horror Express

[Will]

Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, and Telly Savalas in this 1972 extra-terrestrial possession movie.  I found it pretty entertaining, with good work by the leads, and some genuine scares from the body-hopping evil eye monster.

The baddie, an extra-terrestrial accidentally left behind by his crew (I wonder where Steven Spielberg got his idea for E.T. from?) has been trying to get home for millenia.

For some reason, he zaps people with his crazy eyes and sucks their memories out, apparantly thinking that some earth person holds the knowledge (in a movie set in the 1940s) to build a spaceship capable of interstellar travel.  Good luck buddy.

Well anyway, Lee and Cushing play rival archaeologists (Lee found a frozen preserved caveman (containing the extra-terrestrial energy being) and is transporting it by train to England from China.  It's about a 3 slimer.  A fun hour and a half.  Anybody else see it?

btw, I just joined Netflix.com, where for $20 a month, you get three DVDs a week for rental, with no shipping costs or due dates.  As long as you keep sending them back (in a postage-paid envelope that they send), they'll ship you a maximum of 12 per month.  You can keep them as long as you want, but they won't send more until they get 'em back.  It's awesome.  I recommend it.

[Squishy]

I'm pretty sure Horror Express wasn't the inspiration for E.T. :)   but this is one of my favorite guilty pleasures. I'm always horny for a score by the otherwise-almost-universally-loathed John Cacavas (Airport 1975 and '77, The Satanic Rites of Dracula, Hanger 18), and I adore the more ambitious little Brit shockers from Hammer and Amicus (X The Unknown, Quatermass 2, Tales From The Crypt, Asylum, Island of Terror, etc. etc.). The cast is great, the mood consistently creepy, and the deaths are not the modern run-of-the-mill garden-tool-variety slasher-crap, but a far more gruesome fate: one's brains boiled inside one's skull--alive. Screw Scanners, this is the true Nightmare Fuel. Oh, and there's zombies! A bloody-faced, dead-eyed zombie army! Attacking you in the dark! AAAAHHHH!

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"You think HE likes ham! Wait 'til you see ME like ham!"
--Hugo the Dummy in Devil Doll, via MST3K...or me, getting competitive watching B-movies

[BoyScoutKevin]

I for one think anything with both Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee in it, is worth seeing. And this is one of their better ones.
Just a minor correction, in case anybody is looking for a movie set in 1940's Russia. This is not it. Jonathan Rigby in "English Gothic" sets the movie as occuring in 1906. And there are are a number of things about the movie, which I will not go into now, that seem to confirm this earlier date. Enjoy