Speed Demon

A hard-drinking, tough-talking nun who likes cigarettes, one night stands, and telling the Vatican where it can stick its attitude to women. A vengeful demon which has been hunting her for decades and believes its chance has finally come. A train full of innocent people which keeps picking up speed as it hurtles towards a dangerous bend. If Speed Demon were as exciting as the sum of its parts, we’d be in for a great ride. Alas, like many a familiar rail service, it suffers from delays and nothing quite works as it should – but hey, it’ll still get you from A to B.

The nun at the sacred heart of it is Lu (Katie Cassidy), an orphan raised by elderly priest Father Novak (Wiliam H Macy), who has gently tried to rein in her self-destructive tendencies and get her back on the right track, telling her that all he really wants is for her to believe in herself. Unfortunately for the two of them, the train has also been boarded by a hapless guy whom we first see declaring his love for a goth chick he hardly knows. The said goth chick sees him off with a gift he’s not to open until he’s on the train. It’s a wooden box inside which is a small statuette of a demon, upon which he promptly pricks his finger, drawing blood. You can see where this is going.

Present to provide exposition are Father Novak and a ten-year-old girl (Sky Vaux Fuller) who happens to be a well informed train nerd. They are the film’s only truly memorable characters. Neither of them can correctly pronounce the name of the demon (Asmodeus – it‘s not difficult), and neither can anybody else, though if one were a serious believer in such things one might argue that getting it wrong is the responsible thing to do. Serious believers, however, will find that small comfort in a film whose heroine refers to concentrating wine when she means consecrating it, and whose director (Jon Keeyes) just lets that slide. Where one would expect Latin to be used, we get English, with passages of Scripture seemingly taken from an easy-read Bible rather than one with any theological complexity or traditional weight. It’s no wonder that the demon is unimpressed.

Of course, this is less a theological exercise than a vehicle for jump scares and gore. The former are pretty standard, but the use of jump cutting and sudden focus pulls in the earlier scenes of threat is quite effective. The gore is modest – remarkably so for an exorcism film – with effects work centred on varicose veins and cricked necks rather than the gouts of blood, pus or vomit to be found elsewhere in the subgenre. There’s a messy moment early on when birds start hitting the train windows, but after that we see little of the outside world. Shots of the train rattling along the tracks don’t make the intended impression because, honestly, it’s not going all that fast.

The film’s greatest difficulty is that it doesn’t know what it wants to be. Is it full on horror? Is it lightweight comedy? Is it a spoof? Rather than blending these strands in interesting ways, it jumps awkwardly from one to another. There are some fun moments, intentional and otherwise, but in between it struggles, never achieving the hectic pace that its title promises, never fully confident in the appeal of its premise. Its last minute effort to add a bit of social commentary or satire is cute in its heavy-handedness, but feels a bit too desperate. It’s reaching for low-hanging fruit when more ambition would have served it well.

This is one that will go down best in company, after a few beers. It does entertain, but falls short of its potential.

Reviewed on: 28 May 2026