Republished from the show notes of my other site, Fuds on Film.
When I reached the end of John W. Campbell Jr.’s 1938 novella Who Goes There?, I was informed it had been adapted into film three times only. This, I feel, entirely unfairly erases from history 1972’s Horror Express, or Pánico en el Transiberiano a Spanish production very loosely based on the novella.
Helmed by spaghetti western stalwart Eugenio Martín, this sees anthropologist Christopher Lee’s Professor Sir Alexander Saxton discover what he believes to be the missing link in a cave in Manchuria. This being 1906 and air-freight not being so much of a thing, clearly the only thing to do is crate up the corpse and load it on to the Trans-Siberian Express. There he runs into his frenemy, Peter Cushing’s Dr. Wells, at which point you might be getting some strong Hammer Horror vibes which, of course, was very much the intent.
Consumed with curiosity, Dr. Wells bribes a train guard to drill into the case to find out what Prof. Saxton has found. Said guard, naturally, soon shows up dead, with the killer creature on the loose, and, well, you broadly know how this story goes.
The oddest thing about this adaptation, and it has some strong competition in this category, might just be what it chooses to focus on from the novella. While our Thing here can for sure assume the form of the people it kills, it also retains the glowing red eyes and weird telepathic powers of the novella that other adaptations sensibly saw fit to remove. I suppose it makes sense, of a sort, that a shapeshifting imposter should also have a mechanism to fit in to that shape more completely, although why said brain drain should also turn the victims’ eyes white is left unsaid, as is the penchant for leaving one hairy arm untransfigured most of the time. But who am I to doubt the science? I’m no monsterologist.
The changes to the source material are just as peculiar for this pelicula. You could, if you squint a bit, see the tundra of Siberia as equivalent to Antarctica, and I suppose you could argue the train is nearly as isolated as the research base, if altogether more opulent, but other than there being a touch more luxury it’s barely a factor in the script, and it appears, was a decision made purely on the basis of having picked up a train set at a knockdown price. And also a model train set for the special effects.
No, it turns out what the story needed to really push it over the edge, and I’m surprised Carpenter didn’t run with this, is a conflict between a Rasputin expy, Alberto de Mendoza’s Father Pujardov, and a scenery chewing Telly Savalas as a vodka gargling Cossack whipping said Rasputin expy. This is the greatest film I have ever seen and I will not accept your kink-shaming.
Well, not really, but it is a thoroughly ridiculous film that I had a great deal of fun ridiculing. There’s some early doors stuff that’s a bit dodgy – it’s leaning a bit too far towards the Yellow Peril end of things, and it maybe takes a touch too long to make peace with how silly a concept it is and start poking a bit of fun at itself. Like when Lee and Cushing’s characters are asked, “But what if one of you are the monster?” and the reply from Cushing is “Monster? But I’m British, you know!”. Although I’m not sure the Spanish are best placed to be lecturing about colonial attitudes.
Anyway, if you take this film seriously you will have a very bad time of it. So I recommend that you do not do that. To be clear, it’s not any good at all, falling below even the worst of the Hammer Horrors that it’s styling itself after, but it’s a diverting weird alternate universe take on the source material that I’d say is worth a look for die-hard fans of the Carpenter film.