Night Train Murders Review
In order to truly understand Aldo Lado’s 1975 film Night Train Muders, it’s necessary to trace its roots. Those roots lead directly to Last House on the Left (1972). Notice the direct reference to Last House on the cover of the DVD case? Well that’s no coincidence. The packaging even pokes fun at Last House’s then-brilliant advertisement scheme, “It’s only a movie… It’s only a movie.”
To be fair, Wes Craven’s seminal early masterpiece has spawned its fair share of imitations. Some have been pretty good (Ruggero Deodato’s House on the Edge of the Park in 1980) while others have been shameful and uninspired (David DeFalco’s Chaos in 2005). Yet the inspiration, theme and storyline for Last House are, themselves, a re-telling of legendary Swedish director Ingmar Bergman’s 1960 film The Virgin Spring (which went on to win the Academy Award for best Foreign Language Film). The harrowing tale of rape and revenge told by all of these films has its origins in a Swedish folktale entitled “Tore’s Daughter at Vange.” Here are a few lines:
“They have her robe, I know her fate / This strikes my heart a blow so great.”
Tore to avenge his daughter’s life / Rushes on the men with unsheathed knife.
He kills one, he kills another / Now he falls on the little brother.
Now Tore casts his knife away / “O Lord, forgive my deed this day.”
“How can I this deed atone? / To God, I’ll build a church of stone.”
Sounds pretty familiar, right? Although Night Train Murders is a variation on an oft-played theme, it’s easily the most sophisticated, well-orchestrated and thematically complex variation you’re likely to come across.
Director Aldo Lado wasn’t content to just re-shoot Last House on the Left (in fact, he claims he hadn’t seen the film at the time of making Night Train–you be the judge). Lado intended to take the general storyline of Last House and inject it with a distinctly European sense of class-consciousness.
Craven’s film had three thugs and a drug-addled teen tormenting two girls on their way to a rock concert. Lado’s film has two thugs–who are being exploited by a wealthy, bourgeois woman–tormenting two girls on their way home for Christmas vacation. The thugs in Night Train are envious of the moneyed; in a scene on the street at the beginning of the film, we see them appraising the value of a woman’s fur coat before relieving her of her purse. Once they’ve boarded the titular train, they treat the separate compartments as if they were all equal. “I think we’ll be better off in second-class,” one of them says. “We can disappear here.”
By making the father of one of the defiled girls a doctor, Lado is further proving the point that ordinary people are capable of extraordinary violence. The irony in a doctor breaking the Hippocratic Oath to hunt down a murderer with a shotgun is too forceful to ignore–allowing Lado to prove larger points on humanity and society at large.
Don’t be fooled by the packaging–Night Train Muders is far more than your average dime-a-dozen exploitation flick. The two lead female characters are given plenty of screen-time, which Aldo uses to carefully render them in three-dimensions. These girls have genuine personalities. They crack jokes, talk about their budding sexuality, their dreams in life. It’s a genuine travesty when they are tortured and killed. There’s no “sick fun” in this movie, no tongue-in-cheek jokes or light-hearted slapstick.
Night Train Murders is worth watching for Flavio Bucci’s performance alone. As one of the thugs, Bucci crafts an undeniably menacing screen presence that needs to be seen to be believed.
Check this one out. You won’t be disappointed.
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