When Last House On The Left earned surprisingly large sums for such a cheap slasher film, other low-rent producers rushed to make knock-offs of it.  One of these producers,  well acquainted with Eurotrash, promptly hired a competent director and crew to make his Last House clone.  But something funny happened on the way to the box office.  Instead of a tawdry copy of a low-budget shocker, the producer-- and, eventually, the audience--received a well- made, taut, and truly shocking little gem of a horror-thriller...as you are about to find out if you'll heed our advice and...

By HANK REARDON

Although Night Train Murders (1975) played as a horror-thriller around the world, it emerges now as more of a biting commentary on so-called civilized society, and a reflection of the turbulent times and anarchy that beset Italy in the Seventies.

This political instability led to the 1978 murder of Italian premier Aldo Moro by a faction of the Red Brigades, a group of left-wing fanatics who believed that killing the Christian traditionalist Moro would cause the collapse of the capitalist establishment and clear the way for a Marxist-Leninist revolution.

That’s a lot of political baggage and subtext for a film that started off as a complete rip-off of Wes Craven’s Last House On The Left, a cheap exploitation picture that became a breakthrough hit in 1972, leading to cult stardom for its lead villain David Hess.

Night Train Murders also harkens back to Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring (1960) set in Fourteenth-century Sweden, in which patriarch Max von Sydow avenges the rape/murder of his daughter by killing the three swineherds who committed the crime. By a strange twist of fate, the murderers ask for food and shelter from the dead girl's parents, who, upon discovering the truth about their guests, exact a terrible retribution--the same basic plotline as Last House On The Left and Night Train Murders (which was actually marketed in the U.S. as The New Last House on the Left).

Night Train Murders’ lovely, wistful theme song composed by Ennio Morricone and sung by Demis Roussos (Greece's Roy Orbison?) is not at all inappropriate, as many critics maintain. The haunting, melodic song (entitled A Flower’s All You Need) is used for the opening and closing credits, serving as ironic bookends to the film’s grim proceedings. Roussos’ quavering countertenor and the inspired lyrics conjure up images of the innocent teenage girls whose lives are tragically cut short because they boarded the wrong train and met the wrong people: petty criminals Blackie and Curly, and a sinister lady who removes her veil of respectability to reveal a truly perverted persona.

As greybeard director Aldo Lado explains in Riding the Night Train, a 15-minute interview extra on Blue Underground’s DVD release, Night Train Murders is equal parts thriller and social commentary. Lado claims to have never seen Last House On The Left, but liked the basic story outline prepared by his producer Roberto Infascelli, who had been very impressed by Craven’s film.

Lado says he wanted to make a statement about society’s class conflicts and the way the upper echelons use young proles to commit crimes that satisfy their own secret and forbidden passions – a theme explored in his earlier thrillers Short Night Of Glass Dolls (1971) and Who Saw Her Die? (1972). In Lado’s world, those who wear the mask of propriety often conceal a deranged and depraved personality. In Night Train Murders, a sleek, well-to-do lady goads the young toughs into committing the heinous acts for which they will ultimately pay with their lives.

Twice during the film’s running time, the action stops for brief conversations on the nature of violence and class warfare – once when the refined lady chats with a famous politician she meets on the train (just before she drops her open purse and reveals a taste for kinky pornography), and again during a Christmas Eve dinner hosted by the parents of one of the victims.

Schoolgirls Margaret (Irene Miracle) and Lisa (Laura D’Angelo) take the train from Munich through Austria to Italy, where they will spend Christmas with Lisa’s parents. The girls encounter two street thugs (Flavio Bucci and Gianfranco De Grassi) and, during an unscheduled stop caused by a bomb scare, decide to switch trains to evade the lads and the standing-room-only crowds of passengers.

Blackie attempts to rape a handsome, classy woman (Macha Méril) in a lavatory, only to find that the older babe enjoys being taken so roughly by this greasy young punk. The sexual assault awakens evil desires in her. The lady then decides to hang out with the two never-do- wells.

The threesome board the same almost deserted train as the girls, take over their compartment and subject them to a night of degradation and violence that ends in Lisa’s murder and Margaret’s suicide. Lisa’s body is thrown from the fast-moving train, landing in a river, and Margaret leaps to her death--her body crashing into hillside rocks--choosing to take her own life rather than allowing herself to be killed by her attackers.

When the train reaches its destination early on Christmas Day, Blackie and Curly, who had stolen the girls’ tickets, must detrain at the designated stop. The crazy lady tags along with them. At the train station, the unsavory threesome meet Lisa’s father, Doctor Giulio Stradi (Enrico Maria Salerno), who was waiting for his daughter’s arrival. The generous surgeon invites the three strangers back to his house for a Christmas lunch and offers to treat the woman’s leg injury, sustained during the melee aboard the train.

Dr. Stradi gradually finds out about the girls’ violent deaths and how his houseguests were involved in their murders. There follows an orgy of revenge, in which the humanitarian doctor turns into a grief-stricken maniac as he beats and stabs Curly to death, and then pursues Blackie through the woods of his estate, shooting him repeatedly with a high-powered rifle.

The unnamed society woman claims she was forced to watch the horrible deeds committed aboard the train, and (because of her aura of respectability) is given the benefit of the doubt by the vengeful father. The privileged femme fatale is only too willing to throw the two young men over the side to save herself. Darned if she doesn’t get away with murder!

Night Train Murders starts slow, but gradually ratchets up the tension until the suspense reaches unbearable levels. The script, co-written by Lado and Renato Izzo, is streamlined and tightly paced, with no wasted scenes or comic interludes. As Michael Mackenzie notes in his review for DVD Times: "Night Train Murders has a melancholic air of inevitability, with Margaret and Lisa clearly marked as doomed from the moment they board their train, just as Blackie and Curly are doomed from the moment they meet Lisa’s parents."

The scenes of sexual humiliation are hard to stomach, even though they are often suggested off-camera or hidden in the darkness of the train carriage. (God knows how these scenes would be filmed in today’s more permissive environment!) The knife rape that kills Lisa is one of the most disturbing acts of sexual violence I’ve ever seen on film. I almost looked away.

Heroin-addicted Curly, frustrated by his inability to break the virginal girl’s hymen while attempting to rape her, attempts to cut it open with his knife. When Curly hesitates, the depraved older woman shoves the knife all the way in herself, causing the girl to hemorrhage and bleed to death.

This extended scene of sickening debauchery is not gratuitous or misogynistic, as it sets these creeps out as thoroughly despicable and deserving of the terrible fate that awaits them. Especially disturbing is a scene where a distinguished-looking, middle-aged man (Franco Fabrizi) walks by the compartment in which the two girls are being brutalized. The passenger stops and watches instead of running to the conductor for help. When the peeping tom is caught observing the spectacle, he is invited in and has sex with Margaret, who submits resignedly to this latest humiliation. The light in her eyes is extinguished once and for all as the silver-haired devil has his way with her. (We later discover that this man knows Lisa’s father.)

The protracted deaths of the two thugs at the hands of the father can’t help but elicit some sympathy for the hapless victims. Curly’s murder is excruciating, as he is repeatedly stabbed, slashed and battered about the head. Blackie is trapped inside the doctor’s estate, hunted and brought down like a dog. As he begs for mercy and the doctor’s wife (Marina Berti) pleads for an end to the bloodshed, Dr. Stradi administers the coup de grâce to Blackie with a shot to the head at close range, London Underground-style.

Lado’s direction is tight. His camerawork is steady and the lighting in the compartment, with its heavy shades of blue, is amazing. The way these scenes are lit certainly adds to the film’s claustrophobic and uneasy feel. This blue-tint effect is often used nowadays on TV shows like CSI, but was quite unusual for 1975. The spare score by Ennio Morricone makes effective use of a harmonica to announce the nearby presence of an unwelcome visitor.

Night Train Murders is high-class Eurotrash. The acting is first-rate, although the film could have used a better dubbing job. I would have preferred seeing the original Italian version with English subtitles. Macha Méril delivers a chilling performance as the pervert who encourages the street thugs to violate the girls. Méril (who played the doomed psychic in Argento’s Deep Red) has an exotic beauty and (given the fairly brief 94-minute running time) her devolution from respectable intellectual to sluttish sadist is quite convincing.

As the two lower-class misfits, the evil charmer (and David Hess look-alike) Bucci and the frightening De Grassi are outstanding. Bucci went on to a successful career in European films and television, working steadily until the present day. Bucci’s other horror genre credits include Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1977), in which he was cast as a blind pianist who is killed by his own dog, and Frankenstein’s Aunt (1987), where he plays a werewolf opposite Ferdy Mayne’s Dracula.

Miracle and D’Angelo come across as suitably naïve and pathetic, adding to the heinous nature of the crimes committed against them. I doubt that girls their age would be portrayed as such innocents if Night Train Murders were remade in 2005. The stunningly beautiful and talented Miracle went on to appear in a memorable scene opposite Brad Davis in Midnight Express (1978). She later starred as a poet investigating a witches’ coven in Argento’s masterpiece Inferno (1980), made sporadic appearances in films until the late nineties, and then disappeared. It’s a pity that Miracle, now 51, wasn’t available (or asked) to provide an audio commentary for Blue Underground’s high-quality DVD transfer of this underrated film.

Sad to say, the actors who portrayed Lisa’s desperate parents are no longer with us. Leading man Salerno (who played the police inspector in Argento’s The Bird With The Crystal Plumage) died in 1994, while the sexy and mature Berti (among whose credits are An Angel for Satan and What Have They Done To Your Daughters?) passed away in 2002.

As for auteur director Lado, his hot streak ended with Night Train Murders. He seemed to lose his touch after that, helming the execrable 1979 sci-fi flick The Humanoid, which starred Richard Kiel, Barbara Bach and a slumming Arthur Kennedy. However, Lado is an excellent interview subject, and a definite asset to this and other DVD presentations of his work.

No doubt, Lado used an exploitation-horror motif (for box office benefits) to tell a far more complex story. Yet Night Train Murders is not all social commentary or political allegory. It’s an exciting ride down a track of terror, confounding expectations and rising above the standard fare of violent thriller that proliferated in Italy’s movie houses during the Seventies.

So if you haven’t seen Night Train Murders, line up a copy and get on board that hell-bound train!

Thanks, Hank.  Although Night Train Murders was made and marketed as a Last House On The Left clone, it's much more than that--in production values alone, it's almost Gone With The Wind compared to Last House.  Then there's the admirable lack of stupid "comedy relief," which keeps the tension high until the last frame, the intelligent plotting, the excellent cinematography, the score by no less than Ennio Morricone, the sure-handed direction... why it's an insult to compare this movie to that schlocky flick that gave Wes Craven his start.  It's fortunate that now a crisp and clean copy of Night Train Murders is available on DVD and folks can appreciate it as a genuinely intense horror-thriller, one that might actually (in one scene, anyway) cause a few folks to faint.

Article copyright © Hank Reardon

Return To Archives