Pulpy and chaotic, “Speed Demon” delivers demonic train mayhem with girl power and just enough sincerity to make the ride worth taking.
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MORBID MINI: Part possession movie, part runaway train thriller, Speed Demon is the kind of B-movie that could have easily coasted on its gimmick. Instead, it delivers a surprisingly polished, atmospheric, and wildly entertaining ride. It balances cliché and camp with enough craft to keep the whole thing from going off the rails.
Directed by veteran B-movie helmer Jon Keeyes and written by Domenico Salvaggio, Speed Demon is a supernatural action-horror film with a delightfully absurd premise. The film’s clever marketing hook, The Exorcist meets Speed, promises a wild ride. And, for the most part, it delivers.
But there’s also far more care behind the wheel than you might expect.
The film combines the high-velocity mechanics of a runaway train thriller with the spiritual stakes of an exorcism movie, delivering a pulpy, sincere, very early-2000s-feeling genre mashup. The result is refreshingly competent and thoughtfully made, especially given this kind of outrageous, gimmicky concept.
After an effectively creepy cold open, we meet Sister Lu (Katie Cassidy; A Nightmare on Elm Street 2010, Black Christmas 2006), a not-so-pious nun waking up after a night of motel-room debauchery and racing to catch a high-speed passenger train bound for New York City.
Waiting for her is her frustrated mentor, Father Novak (an excellent, if underutilized, William H. Macy), a grizzled but caring priest who feels like equal parts spiritual guide and disappointed surrogate father.
He scolds her for her wayward ways and her inability to honor her commitment to the church, reminding her that her addiction is a darkness that is always looking for a way back in.
Of course, every cursed train needs someone oblivious and arrogant enough to bring evil onboard.
Speed Demon gives us Gabriel (John Patrick Jordan), a cocky archaeologist, unknowingly transporting a stolen statue of the demon king Asmodeus.
From there, things begin escalating in a deliciously nasty fashion.Gabriel gets possessed. Birds slam into the train windows and splatter against the glass in bloody little bursts of carnage. The conductor turns up murdered in a grisly scene. The brakes have been sabotaged.
The passengers are trapped, the train is moving way too fast, and something ancient and furious has decided to come along for the ride.
When Father Novak falls victim to the escalating chaos, Sister Lu is forced to step into the role of defender, attempting what the film frames as the first exorcism officially performed by a nun.
And amid all that B-movie mayhem, Speed Demon attempts to ride the rails of thematic depth, subverting traditional Catholic hierarchy, exploring addiction as metaphor, and tackling the Church’s historic misogyny head-on.
The girl-powered messaging is heavy-handed.
There are moments when the film hammers its feminist themes so hard you can practically hear the nail bend.
But that’s a sin I’m happy to forgive.
I applaud the sentiment, especially because the film is written and directed by men. There is something satisfying about watching a pulpy action-horror film take the familiar nunsploitation-adjacent tropes and turn them on their head.
Here, we get a proactive, action-oriented badass, not an innocent symbol of purity waiting to be corrupted. She is fierce and capable, but still soft and vulnerable beneath the armor.
Cassidy brings a believable scream queen energy to the role, balancing traditional religious devotion with a gritty, street-smart survival instinct.She has seen the abyss up close and still keeps choosing, however imperfectly, to stay on the right side of it.
Of course, Lu’s fight to save the passengers becomes inseparable from her fight to save herself.
Surprisingly, Speed Demon doesn’t come roaring out of the gate as an over-the-top, campy splatter-fest.
Instead, Keeyes plays the first two-thirds relatively straight. He takes his time letting the demonic infection spread. We’re meant to invest in the battle Lu is waging with her metaphorical demons before she steps up to slay the literal one.
That restraint may disappoint viewers looking for nothing but immediate B-movie mayhem. But the patient faithful are rewarded, as Speed Demon barrels into absolute, unhinged chaos.
Lu has to confront her faltering faith to expel the demon, and the film’s Exorcist inspirations are extremely unsubtle. But the film finds its stride in the action-packed finale.
There’s a lot of fun effects work, a good bit of nastiness, and dark atmosphere.It escalates rapidly and delivers a popcorn-munching great time, balancing genuine intensity and gnarly action with the right amount of tongue-in-cheek campiness.
By the time the demon is shouting things like, “Your soul is mine, bitch!” with Freddy Krueger-esque sass, the movie has fully embraced the good-time gas pedal.
The special effects and CGI work are surprisingly polished for a modest indie budget. The makeup effects are especially strong, and there is clearly a great deal of care that went into crafting this film.It does not look cheap or lazy, as so many B-movies do.
This is absolutely a popcorn film, but it still feels like a film.
There is a real attempt to build atmosphere, establish stakes, and give the audience more than a disposable gimmick.
Speed Demon works because everyone involved seems committed to the bit without treating the material like a joke.
There are some egregious plot contrivances, a lot of familiar possession-movie clichés, and several awkward chunks of exposition where characters pause to explain exactly what they are up against and how they are going to work together to survive.
The dialogue can be ham-fisted, and the conspiracy-heavy, tonally disconnected coda leans hard into the film’s B-movie sensibilities in a way that may not work for everyone (I’ll admit, I loved it).
Still, it succeeds by taking itself seriously enough to avoid the groan-inducing trap of trying too hard to be “so bad it’s good,” but not so seriously that it forgets the entire appeal of its premise.
Ultimately, Speed Demon is the perfect watch when you want something a bit mindless but not so dumb that it becomes frustrating. It takes a ridiculous premise and executes it with just enough care, craft, and chaos to make the ride worth taking.
Overall Rating (Out of 5 Butterflies): 3
