The Sci Fi channel is running the movie Alien Express this month. It’s about aliens that take over a passenger train and Lou Diamond Phillips has to kill them. You HAVE to see this just for it’s bad train effects.They couldn’t afford a real train for most of the scenes so they use what looks like a BAD HO model. Don’t bother with the plot or the creature effects, just watch it for the trains. It’s a hoot!
the dome car didn’t have clear glass and they skrewed up the consist about 5 times, not to mention showing the video of the train going by 5 times.
What about the loco in the beginning,it had inside walk ways running down the sides of the motor that where as wide as a hotel hallway. And it wasn’t even an F unit?!?
Any made for TV movie is going to have cheesy trains, after all–the only transportation that most of the directors in Hollywood are familiar with is skateboards. I have no intention of seeing ALIEN EXPRESS, but one question–is it as incredibly stupid as ATOMIC TRAIN with Rob Lowe? Now THERE was a perfect 10 on the Barf-O-Meter, LOL!
Tom[xx(][xx(]
I watched about two minutes of it and that was all I could stand. Yuck!..
If they want to do something for us train buffs, why don’t they do a weekly series like the Love Boat, only have it on a train, and be sure to include lots of sex and lots of sex and lots of sex…
trainluver1
Well trainluver1, many years ago they did do a train show that was an attempt to compete with “Love Boat”. I’m talkin’ 'bout the infamous “Supertrain”… the show that was gonna save NBC from the ratings doldrums. It didn’t work… it was as cheesy as the stuff you see on the tube now. And despite being done in the 70’s I don’t remember there being that much T&A on it… that might have carried it on for a second season. (Scary thought!!!)
Well, I guess I’m glad now that I didn’t make the effort to watch “Alien Express”!
Thank you Vampire. Now that you mention it, I do recall Supertrain, but don’t remember ever seeing a single episode. By the sound of it, I didn’t miss anything…
trainluver1
I flipped past this debacle of a movie last night too (during commercials on the PATS game). “Cheesy” is an understatement! I lingered only a couple of minutes on it – not even the gawd-awful train SFX was worth a laugh. I could have done a better job in N-scale! Then there was the horrid dialog and acting… Now there’s a couple minutes of my life that I’ll never get back. I should have stuck with the commericals on FOX.
Anyone also notice the rather spacious extra wide railcar interiors?
Trains are so often cheesy or portrayed in a negative light in movies.
Atomic Train: Awful. What a depressing waste of t.v time. [V][B)][X-)]
If anyone reads how GE or EMD locomotives are built, there is no way that the train carrying “The bomb” could have lost it’s brakes the way it did. [soapbox] The only decent acting in that movie was the actor who played the down-to-earth engineer on the “atomic” train. He was the same guy who played “Candy Cartwright” in Bonanza years back. [8D]
Supertrain: Saw it as a teen. American Cheese, Love Boat Wannabe. [:p]
A couple of episodes actually had merit, including the one with *** Van *** as a well- meaning unpredictable, psychopath and the other with a nerd-hijacker that helped a woman deliver a baby. Had the show stayed along these lines of drama and suspense instead of going “cruise ship” fantasizing, IMHO, it could have survived longer. [sigh]
By the way was the grouchy engineer during 2nd season Jackie Cooper? (Uncle Fester from the Addams Family). Forgot the cast, but this guy sure looked like the actor.
OK Now that this has gone off about other train shows, How about The Wild, Wild, West?Now that was a cool train!
They just don’t make train movies like they used to. Burt Lancaster’s “The Train” of 1949 was the best train movie I have ever seen.
But, I didn’t think Alien Express was all the horrible. They screwed up on the train BIG TIME. I think the plot was fairly decent, but it would have been better if Sci-Fi didn’t do it. I think I may take on the task of making the next big train movie![:D]
Am I the only one that thinks “Atomic Train” was an awesome movie? I thought that was a pretty cool movie. Not as good as “The Train” or “Silver Streak” but still pretty good.
Oh, I was almost embarrassed to bring it up. Lou must be really hard up. I think the only time I ever saw a real train was at the beginning up until where the meteor hit the car. After that, I think it was all BAD modeling. Talk about low budget.
It was Jackie Coogan, not Jackie Cooper that played Uncle Fester on the Addams family, and the movie The Train with Burt Lancaster was made in the early 1960s, not the late 40s. A bit of trivia while we’re at it; Did you know that Jackie Coogan was one of the glider pilots that flew in the Normandy invasion in WW II…
trainluver1
Thanks for the correction, Trainluver. I remember now, Jackie Cooper was one of the LIttle Rascals and played Perry White in the 1979 Superman.
Speaking of which trains were used well in Superman. A New Haven FL9 in Grand Central and out west the Amtrak “Super Chief” with 3 hulking SDP40fs at high speed.
The 1970s Silver Streak was a nice one! Great shots of those F units and those beautiful Budd cars.
How ironic: Burt Lancaster did an outstanding job in “The Train”
But years later he starred in “The Cassandra Crossing”. Depressing “doom and gloom” movie that climaxes with a passenger train falling off of a very high and old bridge that collapses. Train was obviously HO. Looked like a Marklin switcher locomotive and passenger cars. Waste of Burt’s talent.
By and large, Hollywood has been pretty good with train movies, although sometimes they get the details all wrong–how many coal-burning locomotives have we seen with ‘Baloon’ stacks? Or how many pre-1890 Western trains have we seen with Janney knuckle couplers? When they do it right, like in movies like THE TRAIN or TICKET TO TOMAHAWK, the results can be really entertaining. When they do it wrong, like the insides of AMTRAK cars that look as wide as a hotel lobby, then it’s just shake-your-head hilarious. Of course, sometimes you have to work with what you’ve got–some of the Westerns filmed on the Silverton Branch or the Cumbres and Toltec, have to try and ‘back-date’ narrow-gauge 2-8-2’s built in the 1920’s to the 1870’s, despite the fact that the 2-8-2 wheel arrangement didn’t appear until around the turn of the 20th Century. But that really doesn’t diminish my pleasure at watching films like NIGHT PASSAGE or THE GOOD GUYS AND THE BAD GUYS.
Of course, when it comes to using the wrong diesels on a train in a current film, I have to just let it pass, because frankly, the last diesels that ever got me turned on were the SP and Rio Grande ‘Tunnel’ motors. So if we’ve got Alco RSD-2’s pulling a fleet of AMTRAK coaches and Stephen Segal is trying to thwart the bad guys that have taken over the train, I’ll just watch the action and forget about the authenticity.
But ALIEN EXPRESS just looked too bad for words from the previews.
Tom [:D]
Thomas the Tank Engine show has better modeling! This was like Godzilla movie train effects.
TWhite,
Weren’t those Paducah EMD GP20s hauling that Superliner train in the Stephen Segal movie? Ugly units. Of course, that train crash scenario, in the real world, is so unlikely even in dark territory. Someone correct me if I’m wrong, but if there is a breakdown in communication before trains enter “dark territory” are they not supposed to stop immedietly?
Antonio–they probably were Paducahs–as I said, my knowledge of diesels after Alco PA’s is pretty sketchy, LOL! I think you’re right about ‘dark territory’, but then the producers wouldn’t have had the rest of the movie. One thing that I noticed about the film was the bents on the steel viaduct–notice that they went straight up and down instead of being angled out like normal trestle bents? How would a viaduct THAT tall have stayed up with even ONE train running across it? Seems to me the vibration alone would have collapsed the thing. I’m not sure, but it looked to me that the location photography for the movie was done on the old Rio Grande Tennessee Pass line and maybe some in Gore canyon. Neat scenery, even if the rest of the film was kind of loopy fun.
Tom [:D]
While we’re at picking on Hollywood (I love it…), I’d like to bring up a few other details that they’ve screwed up on besides trains.
In the movie Bad Company where the guy tries to avoid being drafted into the Civil War, the year was supposed to be 1863-at which time all hand guns were still cap and ball black powder revolvers. Why then were they using more modern 1873 Colt
I’m surprised nobody’s mentioned the movie Final Run that was on CBS several years ago. The high-speed passenger train was remote controlled (the throttle lever even slide forward on its own). The interior of the locomotive was all computers with a small diesel generator in the rear. Of course, the whole thing went haywire when the engineer spilled his coffee. Made Atomic Train look realistic.
Kevin