Kelley of the Fort Lauderdale News was critical of the film's "lapses in logic" and clichés, but ultimately deemed it "a respectable (if that's the word) exploitation movie". Jacqi Tully of the Arizona Daily Star wrote a similarly favorable review of the film, praising it for its pacing, setting, performances, and Copperfield's magic tricks. Writing for the Statesman Journal, Ron Cowan commended the cinematography and noted that although the film "starts fairly clumsily, [it] does manage some gripping moments toward the last". Contemporary internet film guide AllMovie praised John Alcott's cinematography, but concluded "Terror Train is too mediocre a piece of work to raise interest from anyone but the genre's most devoted fans", while Time Out London called it "better than most of its kind". Leonard Maltin concurred, claiming that the "stylish photography and the novelty of the killer donning the costume of each successive victim lift this slightly above most in this disreputable genre". Film scholar Adam Rockoff praised the film for its "style and oppressive atmosphere". Horror fiction scholar John Kenneth Muir also praised the film in his book Horror Films of the 1980s: "The thrill of a picture like Terror Train is the shrewd manner in which it plays against audience expectations; the sense that the slasher film paradigm gives it parameters which it can then undercut, subvert, and if needs be, violate". On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, Terror Train holds a 40% approval rating based on 15 critic reviews, with an average rating of 4.9/10. Home media The film was first released on VHS home video in 1988 by CBS/Fox Video. The film was released twice on DVD by 20th Century Fox; once on September 7, 2004 as a single edition release and again on September 9, 2008 in a triple pack alongside Candyman 2 and the original The Fog. Shout! Factory released a collector's edition Blu-ray and DVD combo-pack under their Scream Factory label on October 16, 2012. This Blu-ray edition was out of print five years later in December. Scorpion Releasing released a new limited edition Blu-ray edition on July 22, 2019, exclusively through Ronin Flix. Scorpion released a general retail Blu-ray edition of the film on April 7, 2020, in association with Kino Lorber. Unlike the previous home media releases, the Scorpion Releasing Blu-ray edition featured the second United Artists logo at the beginning of the film. In the UK, 88