November 15 1985 

Scripted by Djordje Milicevic, Paul Zindel and Edward Bunker, from an original screenplay written by Akira Kurasowa, Andrej Konchalovsky’s Runaway Train premieres in New York. Jon Voight and Eric Roberts star as a couple of prison escapees who wind up in a life or death shit storm when the engineer of the freight train they’ve hitched a ride on suffers a heart attack, leaving them at the mercy of a fast-accelerating driverless locomotive barrelling unchecked across the frozen Alaskan wilderness. Co-starring Rebecca De Mornay as a railroad hostler and John P. Ryan as the frothing-at-the-mouth prison warden determined to recapture his inmates dead or alive. A superbly executed, propulsive thriller undeserving of its poor box-office reception.

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