Color, 1975, 94 mins. 20 secs.
Directed by Aldo Lado
Starring Macha Méril, Enrico Maria Salerno, Flavio Bucci, Irene Miracle, Gianfranco De Grassi, Marina Berti, Laura D'Angelo
Severin Films (UHD & Blu-ray) (US R0/RA 4K/HD), 88 Films (UHD, Blu-ray & DVD) (UK R0/RB/R2 4K/HD/PAL), Blue Underground (Blu-Ray & DVD) (US R0 HD/NTSC), Shameless (UK R0 PAL) / WS (1.85:1) (16:9)
Proving that a sturdy premise 
can survive translation countless times, Ingmar Bergman's 1960 Swedish classic The Virgin Spring 
was transformed by Wes Craven and Sean Cunningham into the notorious 1972 drive-in shocker, The Last House on the Left. Noticing the strong box office receipts, Italy decided to return the premise to Europe, albeit centered around an ill-fated train ride from Germany, for a 1976 version entitled Night Train Murders. In turn the American distributor, Bryanston, brought it out under the title Last Stop on the Night Train before revamping it again with wildly misleading poster art as The New House on the Left and Last House - Part II. Adding to the confusion, another Italian horror film, Mario Bava's A Bay of Blood, was also released as The Last House on the Left, Part II. Got all that? The film never quite caught on in America and bypassed the VHS era entirely outside of the bootleg market, though it was widely available in Europe despite being banned in the U.K. as a video nasty. Eventually it was released fully uncut by Blue Underground on DVD, then issued later in a complete version from Shameless in England before making its way to an inevitable eye-popping Blu-ray release.
Lest you think this is a direct carbon copy of Last House, however, Night Train Murders has a few odd twists in store along with some unexpected sociopolitical commentary. Director Aldo Lado, who got his start with the excellent gialli Short Night of Glass Dolls and Who Saw Her Die?, was hardly your average hack, and it's obvious when the film opens with two thugs assaulting and robbing a Santa Claus in the middle of a Munich shopping square that this won't be an easy ride. Said opening is also scored with the sweet "A Flower's All You Need" theme song by Demis Roussos (originally written by this film's composer, Ennio Morricone, 
for the Japanese/Italian animated film, Il giro del mondo degli innamorati di Peynet), which offers a queasy counterpoint to the escalating violence to come. This time our two targeted girls are virginal Lisa (D'Angelo) and her friend Margaret (Inferno's Miracle), who are heading to the warmer climate of Italy on Christmas Eve via an overnight train ride. 
They pass the time by whispering about sex and discovering the thrills of leaning against a vibrating train door, but more sinister things are afoot nearby when the aforementioned two lowlifes, Blackie (Suspiria's Bucci) and Curly (De Grassi), decide to get their kicks by molesting a female passenger (Deep Red's Méril) in the bathroom. As it turns out, the unnamed female passenger is quite the perverse one herself; she not only hides porno pictures in her purse and enjoys the rough advances of Blackie, but she also goads them into terrorizing the two girls before things wind up going way too far. Upon exiting the train, fate has a nasty surprise in store when the nasty trio winds up staying with Lisa's family, surgeon Giulio (The Bird with the Crystal Plumage's Salerno) and wife Laura (An Angel for Satan's Berti) -- and then the fun really begins.
Most horror fans will notice that this film sports a significant quartet of actors from Dario Argento classics both past and future, and it's something of a kick to see them all bouncing off each other in this sick little number. (Eagle-eyed viewers will also spot Phenomena's Dalila Di Lazzaro in a bit part, too.) Méril definitely steals the show here as the most enigmatic and unnerving character, a bourgeois psychopath with no correlation whatsoever to the original Last House. Her increasingly depraved reactions to the antics on the train are deeply creepy, and her fate is one of the biggest surprises the film has to offer if you know the narrative model upon which it's based. Better known for high-profile action and crime films, Salerno brings the necessary gravity to his role as the avenging papa (first introduced during some truly wince-inducing surgery footage), and it's fascinating to see a very young Miracle in her film debut before she moved on to Midnight Express, underwater trauma with Argento's Inferno, and Puppetmaster. Another 
strong asset is the Morricone score, which otherwise dispenses with the "Flower" melody (already exhausted in the film for which it was originally written) and uses a harmonica and percussion to creepily accentuate the rhythms of the train tracks.
Like many other Italian films of the period, this was shot without sound and had to be completely dubbed from scratch for both the Italian and English markets. The mixture of multinational actors is more obvious here than usual, as no one appears to be speaking the same language and neither version really synchs up at all. Therefore, Blue Underground's original DVD from 2004 containing only the English dub was about as valid an option as any, and it looked and sounded fine for its digital debut. 
As for the transition to Blu-ray in 2012, one never quite knows what to expect with Italian genre films these days; fortunately it was one of the stronger transfers of its time without the peculiar watercolor blobbiness caused by rampant scanner noise on too many others. The opening bits in Germany have always looked a little dupey, but once the interiors kick in, the film looks extremely sharp and vivid with rich color and detail. The spooky night scenes inside the train car get a significant boost from the stronger and more accurate color rendition, including the eerie use of blue gels. Audio is once again English mono (DTS-HD MA 2.0 this time), with optional subtitles in English, French, and Spanish. Extras are the same as the DVD, albeit this time in HD with appreciably better image quality: the European trailer, the much more lurid and fun American trailer (under the Last Stop title), a pair of radio spots, a gallery of promotional artwork and stills, and a Lado interview, "Riding the Night Train" (14m58s), in which he discusses the film's casting, visual style, and production logistics. In the interim in the U.K., Shameless released it with no pertinent extras (apart from a few trailers) as a standalone title (with the absurd tagline "Whores Aboard," almost up there with their ones for Torso and Ratman) on DVD in 2004 and as part of a three-film slasher set with Killer Nun and Torso. 88 Films inherited it in the U.K. as a Blu-ray in 2015 featuring a comparable transfer to the Blue Underground with extras including an Irene Miracle interview (21m38s), a "Further Adventures in Italy" featurette (3m48s), and the English and Italian trailers. In 2025, 88 Films upgraded the film UHD and Blu-ray (not available for appraisal yet) featuring a commentary by Eugenio Ercolani and Marcus Stiglegger, a Lado "Class and Carriage Violence" interview, "A Lady Above Suspicion" with Méril, an "All About Lado" career retrospective, "The Most Heinous of Crimes - A Brief Introduction to the Italian Rape and Revenge Film," a Mike Foster video essay called "A Train of Thought," "On the Brink of Anarchy - The Coalescence of Sex and Power in Night Train Murders" by Andrew 
Marshall-Roberts, an appraisal by Stephen Thrower, the archival Miracle and "Further" featuettes, the English trailer, and a gallery.
Also in 2025, the film jumped tracks over to Severin Films for a UHD and Blu-ray edition, first available directly from the label with a soundtrack CD and a limited slipcover and wrap key art design by Eric Lee. As you'd expect, the UHD is the best option with the HDR10 bringing out some extra oomph in that wild blue and rose lighting, as well as an appreciate uptick in detail with much more natural film grain. As usual the main titles look lesser than the rest of the film, but after the 
director credit things are pretty smooth sailing. The DTS-HD MA 2.0 English and Italian mono tracks both sound good with subtitles offered in English-translated or SDH options. Both the UHD and Blu-ray options have the English trailer with the film itself coming with two options: an archival Lado commentary with Federico Caddeo (originally done around the time of their Short Night track for French consumption, with the director's usual thorough and excellent recall for all the production details), and a new track by Art Ettinger and Bruce Holecheck who dig into the film's place in rape-revenge cinema, the occasional transgressive streak popping up in Lado's cinema, the role of the Morricone soundtrack, and the backgrounds of all the major participants. On the video extras side, "Hear My Train A-Comin'" (81m13s) is another massive career-spanning interview with Aldo Lado about his key early gigs, his gialli contributions, this film, and pretty much every other industry-related part of his career. In "The Veiled Lady" (21m31s), Méril speaks very positively about the film, the negative reaction of her friends when she took the role, the common commitment she felt from Lado as Dario Argento, her love of the stylized moments in the cinematography, and her own theories on what makes a film and role worthwhile. "Back on the Train" (8m48s) features De Grassi looking back at jumping into this film after working with Ugo Liberatore, his impressions of the "master" Lado, and anecdotes about various little moments from the shoot that helped him build his thug character even if he had to do some crazy non-permitted craziness in public. "Train In Vain" (16m7s) features Miracle talking about her various careers before acting including teaching ballet, the fortuitous meeting in Italy that led to appearing in movies, the gruesome political crime in Nairobi that gave her a final push, and her memories of her fellow cast members and director that involved a bit of a language barrier. Finally the video essay "Night Train Murders and Sadean Women: Power, Pleasure And The Subversion Of Morality" (9m47s) by Kat Ellinger parses out the film's differences from its overt sources and connected concepts from the work of Angela Carter including the complexities of libertine women and their victims.
SEVERIN (Blu-ray)
BLUE UNDERGROUND (Blu-ray)
Updated review on April 10, 2025
