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Teenagers Lisa (Laura D'Angelo) and Margaret (Irene Miracle) travel
from Germany to Italy by nightttrain to celebrate Christmas with Lisa's
parents ... but fate throws them into a compartment with 2 violent
drug-addicts (Flavio Bucci, Gianfranco De Grassi) and a lady (Macha
Méril). At first the lady seems nice enough, since she keeps the two
thugs under control, but after a while she shows her true colours, and
encourages her friends to do more and more mean things to the girls,
eventually she has the girls partly undressed too, and forces another
passenger (Franco Fabrizi) - who preferred peeping on the proceedings to
getting help - to rape Margaret. Then the lady and her thugs turn their
attention to Lisa and find out that she is still a virgin ... and they
want to deflower her with a knife - thing is, they are not too careful
doing so and eventually stab her instead.
With her friend dead, Margaret makes a desperate getaway, which
eventually has her jump out of a window of the speeding train to her own
death. The good lady and her friends dispose of dead Lisa and the girls'
luggage through the window too, just before the conductor comes by, and
they act as if nothing had happened ... only the lady's leg is badly hurt. Ironically,
our cruel trio get off the train exactly where Lisa and Margaret wanted to
get off, and somehow they hook up with Lisa's parents (Enrico Maria
Salerno, Marina Berti), who have come to pick her up, but think the girls
have just missed a connecting train. Lisa's father, a doctor, even offers
to take a look at the lady's leg and to this end, invites the trio to his
home. Somehow though, it seems the three act a little crazy, and Lisa's
dad's worrying for the girls also puts him on the edge a bit ... so when
he finally learns - from the radio, no less - that the bodies of Lisa and
Margaret were found by the traintracks, he is quick to put two and two
together, and at first gets at the lady's throat - but she successfully
convinces him that it was the two drug addicts, not her, who were
responsible, and she's just another victim. So now dad goes after the
thugs, beats one of them to pulp and hunts the other down with his hunting
rifle, in the end shooting him in the head when he's quite helpless. In
his eyes, justice is served ... and he has of course no idea that he let
the ringleader escape ... Obviously inspired by Ingmar
Bergman's The Virgin Spring
(1960) and Wes Craven's Last
House on the Left (1972), Night Train Murders is still a film
that can be judged by its own merits: It features tight storytelling,
fleshed out characters and a grather stylish direction - and the ending,
with the father taking revenge on the thugs, is a quite ambivalent one in
more than one way ... his sudden bloodlust makes you almost feel sympathy
with the thugs (who during the film have done everything to be as
detestable as hell), while dad comes across a bit like Count Zaroff from The
Most Dangerous Game. It gives the whole vendetta concept an
interesting spin ... One thing though, the film is definitely not for
the faint-hearted.
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amazon.co.uk
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find Night Train Murders at adultvideouniverse.com
