NIGHT TRAIN MURDERS (Eli Roth, Part I)
Rotten Tomatoes recently posted an article called Eli Roth Presents the Best Horror Movies You’ve Never Seen, seven films that Roth claims “had some effect” on him. As I’m always up for suggestions from other people with sick minds (and as I’d love to see what may have inspired Hostel’s wonderfully shocking eye-snipping scene), I thought I’d check them out…
I decided to start with Aldo Lado’s 1975 NIGHT TRAIN MURDERS, a film Roth describes as a Last House on the Left rip-off.
True the structures of both films are identical (idealistic girls set out on a journey, they cross paths with perverted and violent thugs…you know the rest), but I was stunned to find that Night Train Murders was actually able to out-Last House of the Left Last House of the Left.Which is to say that as deranged and graphic as the mental and ultimately physical torture scene in Craven’s 1972 was, I hadn’t quite seen anything like what befalls our virginal lasses in Lado’s savage train ride.
Calling this film a Last House of the Left rip-off is sort of like calling Last House of the Left a Virgin Spring rip-off - the inspiration is there, the structure is there, but there is so much that sets Night Train Murders apart, specifically in attention to character and style, that it really does stand apart as a pretty astounding horror flick. And this is Roth’s brand of horror, to be sure - no monsters here, no demons or ghosts or killer dolls. This is it could happen to you terror, the kind that’s found its recent resurgence in everything from Hostel to Disturbia to P2, and as with many 70’s Italian horror flicks like it, it is extremely brutal.
…and again, like many 70’s Italian horror flicks like it, it also exceptionally beautiful and stylish. The Italian masters took pride in their eye for cinematography and love for the European landscape, and regardless of the fact that you were watching a film in which a dog tears his blind owner’s throat out (gotta love Suspiria), if it was Italian, you were in for a sumptuous feast for the eyes and ears. There is some great editing here, particularly between brutality and bliss (there is something haunting about shifting focus between the rape of a woman, and her parents patiently waiting at home for her return - and yes, it’s been done before, but the degrees of both the savageness of the attack, and the beauty, decadence, and warmth of the home, was very effective here). Add to it all the music of the indelible Ennio Morricone - as he did for Bronson in Once Upon a Time in the West, here he gives one of our villains an ominous harmonica theme, which our thug plays throughout the film. Once our heroines find themselves alone in a seemingly abandoned train car, and all is dark outside, you find yourself both anticipating and dreading hearing it - and once it finally comes through the darkness, you know this film is about to get ugly…
And yes, as you’d expect from a film like this, there comes of course a very graphic and shocking scene of torture and rape - it is prolonged, it is played savagely straight, and the extent to which one girl in particular is maimed is far more disturbing than what befell the girls in Last House of the Left (in comparison, those two got off easy…). That being said, what really left me extremely impressed with this film is that I walked away far more disturbed and intrigued by the actions and motivations of two characters in particular: an old man who finds himself in the same train car where the girls are being assaulted, and a beautiful woman (played by Belle De Jour’s Macha Meril) who is introduced early in the film as a passenger on the train, and who ultimately becomes a sort of Angel of Death, coaxing out the darkest parts of our villains by calmly whispering her demands of violence while taunting the girls’ virginity, even at one point sharing a bit of her own violent sexual history. This chick scared the hell out of me, in that you-are-sick-lady-so-why-do-I-find-you-so-seductively-intriguing sort of way.
That this ultimately ends up being a revenge movie should be no spoiler, given what we all know (or should know) about how Last House on the Left plays out. But this film doesn’t end quite as tidy as Last House on the Left; even after the inevitable bloodshed, it was the last frame of the film that struck me. Without giving anything away, it’s the way the characters are framed, and the looks on their faces. Is there regret there? Or pity?
I recommend this film with some reservation - I’ll say again, it is brutal. But it is a very effective horror film, and certainly one to watch for those with the stomach for it, and with a penchant for films that evoke a visceral reaction.
NETFLIX link to Night Train Murders
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