Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing’s Best Team-Up Ditches Hammer for Zombie Aliens on a Train

For all their dozens of movies together and their well-documented friendship, Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing rarely played allies. Even their non-franchise, lesser-known features from Hammer Films usually set the pair at odds with one another, a casting choice established by The Curse of Frankenstein in 1957 and perpetuated by Horror of Dracula the next year. Similarly, the anthology films made by Amicus Productions, Hammer's American cousin, kept them separated in different installments per movie. Those overlapping facts make 1972’s Horror Express, a Spanish-British production with no ties to Hammer or Amicus, an outlier in their mutual filmography and the best use of their chemistry on and off the screen. The genre-bending, low-budget horror flick frees the friends from their conventional expectations and lets them play off one another to the fullest extent of their long-standing yet underutilized camaraderie.