Runaway!
A group of skiers are trapped inside a runaway train hurtling down a mountainside.
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- Cast:
- Ben Johnson , Ben Murphy , Ed Nelson , Darleen Carr , Martin Milner , Lee Montgomery , Vera Miles
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Reviews
Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!
Waste of time
Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.
Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.
So here's the story. Within the first 10 minutes of the picture, the train's engineer learns that he has no brakes AND they're going downhill through the mountains. Now you'd THINK this would mean the movie would be at most 15-20 minutes long...yet somehow they pad it out to full length for a made for TV film! So what do they do? Pad, pad and pad!You have to understand the context for this picture. The 1970s were HUGE for disaster pictures and this is one of about 19,000,000 such films that were made about impending doom during that time. Earthquakes, floods, fires, boats, airplanes, you name it...and so why NOT make a film about a train full of passengers waiting to die?! Well, common sense would indicate they shouldn't but it was the rage at the time.Ways they padded some films was make a few characters with some silly backstory...and the one they invested the most energy on was the divorcing couple who hate each other and you KNOW what is going to happen with them by the end of the movie!! Overall, a dumb premise and a film I can't see watching unless you are some sort of disaster movie groupie.
A passenger train in the snow is a runaway.I am a 1970s disaster movie-lover, my childhood was in that period, and I am now very surprised to find a movie of this genre now today in 2016 (on YouTube)! Why has this movie been kept on the shelf away from TV re-runs and DVD??? How dare they!Well anyway, the review. This movie is all about interesting people like Vera Miles, Martin Milner and others. Don't expect any lavish special effects or anything like that, in fact some scenes are very obviously filmed in a studio. You will not even get a decent musical score. This is all about people and suspense, and done is a very pleasing way!Find this TV movie on YouTube, I hope they don't take it down!
For railway enthusiasts like me, this made-for-television film looked to be quite promising. It was originally premiered over 40 years and its many years since I have last seen it on the living room box but I was able to recently download it. Its sometimes unauthentic and a bit silly about a doomed train running out of control due to technical brake failure (or other faults) and makes you hold your nerves as it is downhill all the way to disaster some miles away for 200 passengers and crew members on board and a rescue locomotive couples up from behind when there could have been an alternative option to avert the major crash. Also, there is no way a rescue locomotive could have it's air-hoses connected while the train is moving at speed and that's one of the biggest problem with this film. Overall, its not too bad-a-film for its time.
I'm an avid railroad fan, and for all of its inadequacies, I feel that this movie still rates as excellent. I first saw this as a child, and have been searching for it for over fifteen years. I was lucky enough to find someone on Ebay that has a 35mm copy of it and does sell videos of it, so for all the true fans of this movie, check out Ebay.As for the technical end of it, the plot is probably something that could not happen, at least in the magnitude depicted here. ALL diesel locomotives have something called a TRACTION BRAKE, which, like the reversal of an airliners engines to slow an aircraft, does essentially the same thing. The traction brake reverses electrical polarity to the motors, causing them to act AGAINST forward motion. This is comparable to downshifting an automobile transmission into first or low gear when descending steep hills. By itself, the traction brake could not have stopped the train, but the locomotive could have slowed the train down to a less than fatal speed. Also, a helper locomotive added to the rear of a train would probably not have the power to stop a train travelling 70+ mph by itself. It would need the assistance of the air brake throughout the train to accomplish that - which was useless in the movie plot, and even if it weren't, there's no way the air hoses could be connected on a moving train.Despite these flaws, the movie is very entertaining, and at 70 minutes, it is like a sweet and satisfying snack, compared to a 120 minute main course.