Night Train - pretty good for a B movie

I grabbed this flick at Blockbuster the other night on a whim. I knew little of it. It's a decided B-movie without, as I later found out, even a single review at Rottentomatoes.com. My biggest concern was the cover, which suggested it might be a gruesome, mindless slasher film. It isn't. It turned out to be a pretty good choice.

Night Train is a story of three strangers that meet aboard a train on one snowy night -- one with ridiculously few passengers and not much of a business model. Danny Glover is the train's conductor, Leelee Sobieski is the hot, but unhinged med student, and Steve Zahn is the scheming, eccentric salesman. When a nameless passenger dies shortly after boarding their car, Zahn and Sobieski discover he was carrying a box containing a fortune in diamonds. Together they plot to dispose of the man's body and keep the box's contents for themselves. All manner of paranoia, double-crosses and murder follows. There also may be something more sinister and mysterious to this box than any of them suspect.

The movie is a homage to movies of yore -- dumbed down Hitchcock. The scenery and setting is very appealing. The characters are beguiling. The ending, however, is absurd, and ruins what could almost have been a fantastic movie. Overall, it is still worth a watch.