For a blaxsploitation flick, this movie's sure got a lot of white people in it. I'd never heard of the R&B group "Bloodstone" before but apparently they were popular when they made this low-budget musical homage to Hollywood back in 1975. A "Blackstone" band member gets knocked out backstage at one of their concerts and dreams the group are porters on an Art Deco train bound for Hollywood with Bogie, W.C. Fields, Jean Harlow, Jeanette Macdonald & Nelson Eddy, Dracula, The Godfather & The Wild One, Rhett Butler & Scarlett O'Hara, Peter Lorre, and a sheik & his harem along for the ride. There's quick sketch romance, dance, and murder that the band interrupts often to flex their pipes singing pop tunes like "Toot-Toot-Tootsie Good-Bye", a du-wop ditty or two and, of course, original compositions ("...There's nothing as scintillating, nothing so captivating as a train ride..."). Unless there's some subliminal substance to this silliness, the stars' servant-like roles may be accidentally un-PC today but it's all in innocent, corny fun geared toward a kiddie mentality. The Godfather suffocating his victims with his armpit, all the stars getting stoned on the sheik's hookah pipe, and an obese boxing match with a gorilla are just some of the slap-happy shenanigans going on in a concussion-induced Hollywood hallucination not unlike Dorothy's in THE WIZARD OF OZ. The celebrity impersonators are pretty good and an authentic Art Deco L.A. train station was used for one song & dance number but the only actor I recognized was Phyllis Davis (who I think I remember from TV) as Charlotte O'Hara. Die-hard movie buffs may find this harmless nonsense mildly amusing but, even then, I'd recommend it only as a second feature for THE MAN WITH BOGART'S FACE (1980).
Review of Train Ride to Hollywood
