This movie is not about your everyday, ho-hum, garden variety two million-year-old slime beast found frozen in a cave in remote China. No, this one is special. It can kill a person simply by making eye contact. From there it absorbs every thought, personality trait, piece of knowledge and chili recipe from their brain until the victim somehow becomes a blood-splattered mess with solid white ping-pong balls for eyes. Leave it to a stuffed shirt anthropologist played by Christopher Lee to put this monster in a box and on a fancy Trans-Siberian Railway train full of hoity-toity types on his way back to England for further study. Do I even have to tell you that the creature breaks out and ruins everyone’s four-course dinner? Good thing Peter Cushing is there to help stop it. That’s still not enough though, so in comes Telly Savales as a Russian military captain. He looks pretty good in the uniform and has great screen presence, but he makes zero attempt at a Russian accent. He’s the only Cossack who’s from Garden City, New York.
This feels a lot like a Hammer film, but it’s not. It’s a Spanish production that follows the formula well with Lee, Cushing, two eye-candy actresses (Silvia Tortosa, Helga Liné), a memorable creature and some good gore that must have turned stomachs in ’72. The pace is swift and the story never stops crackling. It’s perfect stuff for a Saturday afternoon veg out.