Average User Rating: 0 Vote(s)
 
Average User Rating
Average User Rating
Average User Rating
Average User Rating
Average User Rating
Average User Rating
Average User Rating
Average User Rating
Average User Rating
Average User Rating
Coverscan of Train Ride to Hollywood
Video Cover Thumbnail(s)

Distributor Radialchoice
Catalogue Number PIC20
Release Series
Release Date November 1982
Duration: 85m 13s
Printed Classification
Notes
User Reviews:
by paul higson
TRAIN RIDE TO HOLLYWOOD (1975) Directed by Charles R. Rondeau. I just can't help myself can I. There I am in eBay, encounter a pre-cert video of a film I have never heard of with a mad synopsis. Have to grab it. Even at the point of purchase I'm not sure what exactly I'm getting. Lunatic comedy, I presume. Blaxploitation musical I find. And more. All of it to annoy me...simply made to irritate me.Black swinging singing group Bloodstock are due for an encore when one of the movieland loving singers takes a knock to the head and awakens at Union Station where the band board a train for Hollywood. Also on the train are a film director, a selection of Hollywood's greatest names and characters and a sheik and his harem of seven beautiful girls. Anyway, Nelson Eddy and Jeanette McDonald are murdered smothered by a mystery killer's poisonous armpits. Humphry Bogart reluctantly investigates and they get high in the shoes carriage smoking some good Morrocan on his pipe. In the Night it is that part of the month when old Don Corleone is affected by the position of the moon and metamorphoses into a psychotic young leather clad biker...resulting in the murder of Jean Harlow (played by Roberta Collins, wasted) and Clark Gable. Bogie tries to help but is too late, Count Dracula meanwhile is hiding in his coffin scared.They stop at a ghost town to bury the Hollywood couple, not Eddy and McDonald...They are forgotten on the floor of the dining car buried under a steady snowfall that followed them around. Anyway, a University is threatened with closure if a boxing match isn't won (keep up, no dawdling). Unfortunately,the University's fighter can't fight because he has herpes...so a member of Bloodstock agrees to fight. It turns out he is fighting a gorilla (and the referee is Bud Westmoreland) He wins and the band and the other survivors finally get to Hollywood for their auditions only for all but our dreamer to end up the victim of the Wild One who is about to make the last band member the final exhibit in his Hollywood "wax museum". He wakes up and the band sing a cover of The Beatles' "Money".You want to see it now, don't you? Don't! Do! The musical numbers are a mix of popular tunes and original numbers and though the classics are classic, the original songs are not distinctive and sport appalling lyrics. It reminds me of the Vincent Price atrocity "Time Express" and the linking episode of NIGHT TRAIN TO TERROR. It might just be marginally more entertaining than Sidney lumet's THE WIZ....and certainly can't be branded as being any worse than XANADU or CAN'T STOP THE MUSIC....though by edging it's bets by mixing standards with new it dishonors itself by not being brave enough to be an original soundtrack nor a jukebox musical. On the plus sides...They can sing...but fail to impress. There are also a lot of beautiful women in here including Tracy Reed as one of the harem and an unknown to me GerrI Reddick who pretties up another song and dance number with her loveliness and tap dancing.The film might connect with some who grew up with this band (think they might have had another name, which was displayed on the theatre front at the beginning of the film) and the numbers and may have seen the film in the day...almost certainly not in the UK. Unforgiveably painful though is the comedy which is awful and does include the occasional custard pie in the face. The band members goofing is simply not funny. We also have lookalikes who...well, maybe Stevie Wonder was the casting director. The actor playing Clark Gable might actual be Singaporean. They couldn't look any less than the people they are portraying.The video was also released on the label Radial Choice which I have never seen before. Their logo has to be one of the longest in the animation construction and changes from Radial to the Entertainment people. The only trailer is for Betty Boop, a montage of scenes clumsily linked to a naff song that seems to have been a ballad written for bible thumpers.I've been ignorant of this film for forty years and I could have done with being ignorant of it forty more. Double bill it with THE WIZ or the sad Morecambe and Wise film NIGHT TRAIN TO MURDER.