It’s feeding time for the monsters again in director Aldo Lado’s 1974 quasi-giallo Night Train Murders, which sees the young and lovely Margaret and Lisa (Irene Miracle and Laura D’Angelo, respectively, making their film debuts) cross paths with violent criminals while travelling overnight by rail from Germany through Austria to Italy. The stage is set as Pacino-esque stickup man Blackie and his harmonica-blowing sidekick Curly (Flavio Bucci and
Gianfranco De Grassi) mug an alcoholic sidewalk Santa Claus in Munich’s Marienplatz. Menace! With that kind of element loose in the cities, why would two girls choose to ride some skeevy midnight train into Italy instead of opting for a sensible air flight? From one mother to another, via telephone: “Planes are never on time these days.”
Because Lado’s film cuts back and forth between the
innocent girls and their street-tough counterparts, there’s never any
doubt where things are headed. And because the movie depicts rape,
sexual mutilation, and murder, and especially because the third act
involves a dead girl’s father taking revenge on her behalf, à la
Bergman’s The Virgin Spring, Night Train Murders is often regarded as a blatant knock-off of The Last House on the Left. (In 1978, it was actually distributed stateside under the odd title The New House on the Left,
with the appropriate “it’s only a movie” shtick in the advertisements.)
But in reality, the two films don’t have so much in common.
For starters, Night Train Murders is more ambitious than The Last House on the Left. Lado’s film introduces a new character on the train, a beautiful, well-dressed woman (it’s Macha Méril, of Godard’s Une femme mariée and Argento’s Deep Red)
bereft of inhibition or conscience. Assaulted in the train’s bathroom,
she quickly turns into a pliant sex kitten. (Cue exterior shot of
locomotive plunging into a dark tunnel.) What looks at first like simple
retrograde gender politics turns out to be class-based snark, as Lado
casts this upscale woman as master of ceremonies for the upcoming funny
games. It’s at her urging that the two men, having cornered the girls in
a dark compartment of a largely deserted train, escalate their base
behaviour from testosterone-addled thuggishness to out-and-out savagery.
And it’s by her hand that the worst crime is committed.
Another big difference is that Lado is
much more of a stylist than Craven ever was. The Ennio Morricone score,
orchestrated for lonely harmonica, classes up the atmosphere a bit, as
does the relatively careful cinematography by Gábor Pogány. At one
point, the well-dressed woman blows out a candle, suddenly bathing the
proceedings in an oppressive blue light that deepens the shadows and
amplifies the through-the-looking-glass quality of the midnight torture
session. The artifice adds distance to the depravity on screen,
employing a strategy that’s pretty much the opposite of the
uncomfortable docudrama approach that made The Last House on the Left
so appalling. It may seem like an odd thing to say about a movie in
which a teenaged virgin receives a knife to the groin, but nothing in Night Train Murders is as hard to take as the moment in Last House where a kidnapped victim is forced to piss herself. Craven’s film remains the gold standard for this stuff.
Unfortunately for Night Train Murders,
the brutal midsection aboard the train is the only part that’s of any
interest. The leisurely opening set in Munich and the later, plodding
material at Lisa’s family home in Verona are full of padding, and the
final revenge sequence lands with substantially less power than the
crimes that preceded it. (For some reason, an early scene includes
footage of an actual surgical procedure, which serves no real purpose
but to highlight the general phoniness of horror-movie representations
of blades cutting skin.) The execution is pedestrian, with Lado never
venturing far down the more surreal or dreamlike paths favoured by his
better-known compatriots in the genre arts.
Worth a note is the movie’s sly humour
about European politics, exemplified in one scene where an academic type
notes that totalitarianism-with this, he nods approvingly in the
direction of China!-may be one way to control amoral behaviour, and
another that has Blackie bursting in on a compartment full of old men
singing a German anthem to deliver an enthusiastically reciprocated
“Heil Hitler.” His Nazi salute turns quickly to the obscene French bras d’honneur
before he slams the compartment door shut and gleefully scampers away.
(Say what you will, the Fascists made the trains run on time, am I
right?) It beats the risible dinner-table yakking later on about the
roots of society’s ills. No need for such a blunt restatement of the
picture’s central theme-soon enough, we’ll see the underclass punished
for its aberrant behaviour as the similarly culpable bourgeoisie steals
away blamelessly into the night.
Blue Underground seems to have catalyzed a widespread re-evaluation of Night Train Murders among horror enthusiasts with its DVD release back in 2004. The title doesn’t even appear in my go-to horror reference, The Overlook (Aurum) Film Encyclopedia,
which was last revised in 1995, though it does take up most of four
pages in the “Rip-Offs and Rehashes” chapter of the definitive Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left: The Making of a Cult Classic
by David A. Szulkin, who slams it for its “rancid philosophizing.”
Amusingly, the critical quote gracing the disc jacket (“More
reprehensible than Last House on the Left!”) was taken from a blurb by an AllMovie Guide
writer who clearly hadn’t seen the film or understood anything about
the circumstances of its making. Run a Google search, though, and you’ll
find countless opinions on Night Train Murders registered following home viewings over the last eight years-including some by writers who claim it eclipses Last House in quality.
Quality is a tricky metric for movies that
get their juice entirely from scenes of terror and degradation, so I’ll
simply note that, while neither of these are especially fine films,
there are good reasons why The Last House on the Left is the one that enjoys international notoriety and landmark status. That said, the new Blu-ray edition should only further Night Train‘s
rehabilitation, rendering its mid-1970s European locations in
high-definition and the bloody wee-hours debasements with an emphasis on
the rich and ironically seductive qualities of Lado’s blue moonlight.
The 1080p, AVCHD image is slightly letterboxed to 1.85:1 (not the 1.66:1
you might expect) and has been encoded at generous bitrates, despite
the fact that it resides on a single-layer disc. I detected no
compression artifacts from a normal viewing distance.
Blue Underground has come in for some criticism of the thick layers of grain that encased titles such as Django,
and while I have found tack-sharp layers of grain on the company’s
Blu-ray releases to feel just right, I’m re-evaluating them based on
some convincing arguments2 that their grain is in fact entirely too
sharp. I’m intrigued by the idea that cheap Eurocult pictures could
legitimately look a lot cleaner on Blu-ray than we’ve seen to date, but I
remain a little concerned that BU has responded to the complaints in
part by cranking up the DVNR. Grain is quite mild here, and in day
exterior shots it’s hardly in evidence at all. Detail is likewise
muted-fabrics, feathers, and complexions are awfully blank in some
shots. In a pan along the Marienplatz showing the blue-and-white awnings
of booths set up in the square, it’s clear that the elements are
damaged, with a raindrop pattern of splotches dancing across the frame
(see screencap #3). This would have been even more distracting without
noise-reduction, but as you step through frame by frame you can see the
odd ways the algorithms are monkeying around with both the splotches and
the fine details, like the slender vertical component of a yellow crane
near the top of the frame that flickers in and out of visibility. The
next shot includes my favourite harbinger of aggressive DVNR, as geese
wheeling through the sky are intermittently interpreted as print
speckles and erased from the frame. Still, it’s a good-looking disc on
the whole.
The 2.0 DTS-HD MA track is as you’d
expect from a decently-transferred Eurocult film of this vintage. The
dubbed English dialogue is clear but not overly bright, standing out way
in front of the rest of the mix. Switching my receiver to surround mode
steered everything to the centre channel, as God intended. It would
obviously be preferable to have an Italian listening option, regardless
of whether the original-language dialogue was overdubbed in post.
Supplements are recycled from the DVD.
“Riding the Night Train” is a 15-minute interview (upconverted
standard-def) in which Lado himself defends the film as a deterrent to
violence, explains its reliance on the colour blue, and discusses the
censor board’s reaction to the picture and some other aspects of its
production. (Amusingly, he blames Morricone for the incongruously
treacly theme by the Greek pop start Demis Roussos, who was in Aphrodite’s Child
with Vangelis, that opens and closes the film.) Also on board are two
trailers (U.S. and international) in standard-def MPEG-2, plus a gallery
featuring posters, production stills, and other ephemera that give you
an idea of how Night Train Murders was marketed around the world.
(As usual, I’d rather these fill the frame horizontally or vertically
than float in a window with wasted pixels on all four sides, but oh
well.)
1. I know some aficionados would say that Night Train Murders is no giallo
because it doesn’t involve a mystery. I’m describing it that way
because it’s a useful shorthand for the film’s stylistic
characteristics, and because Night Train Murders inverts the
usual whodunit. There’s never any doubt about how or by whom the most
heinous crimes are committed; circumstances only become murky when it
comes time to assign blame and mete out punishment.
The working theory appears to be that poorly calibrated CRT-based film
scanners (at, say, a single European lab handling the lion’s share of
Italian 1960s and 1970s genre-film transfers) could yield an overly soft
picture overlaid with a fresh layer of noise. If attempts were made to
correct the softness by sharpening the image, the noise would be made
worse.