A Masterpiece!

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

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).

This is not an overly serious movie. If you're in the mood for something silly a la a poor-man's Mel Brooks flick, this is one that is done by a tight soul group called Bloodstone. I gave it a 7.In addition to some original music, the group does good covers of a striking variety of song genres, and I think this is a particularly good quality of the film and music. Examples from the 40s-50s-60s: As Time Goes By (very good version!), Yackety-Yack, Money (yeah the one that the Beatles covered).These guys looked to me like they had a very good time making this movie, and that makes the movie better.This movie is not meant to be the experience of a century. It's just a deliberately ridiculous musical romp with some terrific music, some ok choreography and a villain or two and that's that. I liked it because of the music, the performances of individual group members, the soundtrack ages quite well in my collection and in the end it's an B-movie plot. On this last point, I'd say that, if you're in the mood for a silly musical, the plot-story is weak but ok, with a lot of referential characters (impersonated characters such as of Bogart, A Legosi-ish Vampire, Nelson Eddy+Jeanette MacDonald, I think maybe a James Dean-type, etc.)The group members are sufficiently ok in acting that one can like them.The DVD does not stand in well as a good-audiophile soundtrack (unless there's something I don't quite get about how to use a video DVD to play back sound). Since the music is what I wanted to re-listen to many times, I had to get the CD. But there's nothing wrong with the film. I'd have to give it higher than a 5, the average at the time of this writing, if only because an enjoyable musical is so hard to find.I had to wait about 20 years for them to come out with both the movie and the CD. Something has always been wrong with Bloodstone's music and film distribution. I saw this film in the 70's and here it is 2002 and finally it's available on VHS or DVD? What about the soundtrack? Why wasn't that available with other Bloodstone albums, until now? What the heck is up with that? This isn't the first time I've run into that trouble finding Bloodstone's work. There was also a problem with getting all the songs from the vinyl of Natural High on to the CD. To my knowledge, that hasn't been fixed.

We saw this movie when it was released in 1978. It was one of the silliest movies that I had ever seen, but I go to the movies to escape from real life, to be entertained. This movie had great musical numbers (I've had the soundtrack for 15 years) and quite a few entertaining moments. If you're a 30s or 40s movie buff and a fan of the old Fred Astaire musicals, you'll like the dance numbers alone. If you can sit back and see the humor in life, just let yourself go, then you'll enjoy "TRAINRIDE TO HOLLYWOOD".

Members of the 70's pop/soul group Bloodstone ("Natural High") enter a dream sequence in which they disguise themselves as porters to get to Hollywood for an audition. Also on the train are cheap impersonators of Bogie, W.C. Fields, Rhett and Scarlet, Jeanette and Nelson, Bela Lugosi, plus a sheik and his harem. Some fine musical numbers liven up a rather hackneyed self-referential movie. Still an interesting trip for cinema fans, and more economical than the later star-laden failure "Won Ton Ton, the Dog Who Saved Hollywood."