Rating: 3/5
Cult Movie Challenge 2024 | 21/52 | 70s Disaster
Geneva, Switzerland An ambulance pulls up to the hospital. Two men wheel a man through narrow halls at the International Health Organization. At the US mission, a guard tells the men they’re in the wrong area. The man on the stretcher pulls away his sheet to reveal a silenced pistol, which he used to shoot the guard.
The terrorists set up a bomb, but security catches up with them before it detonates. The shootout goes through a lab, taking down another terrorist, and also hitting containers of a yellowish substance. Eklund, the third terrorist, escapes through the window.
One shot terrorist survives the shootout. They put him in a quarantined hospital room, where they monitor his vitals. Whatever was in that lab was a bacterium — a pneumonic plague that leaves yellowish scabs covering his shaking and sweating body.
Eklund sneaks onto a train. Our star-studded cast joins him on the train, each getting an eccentric introduction. Finally, we see our sweating terrorist stowed away in the back.
We eventually learn that some of them carry secrets that could get them in trouble. OJ Simpson shows up as a priest — or is he??? We also get some heroin smuggling and arms dealers.
They plan to quarantine the passengers in a former Nazi concentration camp. One passenger survived that very camp (played by Lee Strasberg) — not tasteless at all! The train must cross an out-of-use bridge called Cassandra Crossing to get there.
Sophia Loren and Richard Harris are exes who blab with each other as though we already know their history. I eventually warmed to them, but it was so jarring at first.
Ava Gardner and Martin Sheen have a thing going. Between this and Tam Lin, I’ve only seen Ava Gardner hooking up with younger men.
It’s so funny watching Eklund on the train sweating and touching everything — he picks up a kid to help them see out the window, and he curls over in pain over the food in the kitchen, sweat splashing on all the food. This is exactly how I would approach a parody.
Once the movie got into an outrageous spectacle, I enjoyed it more. I wish it didn’t take an hour to get there.