Two psychopathic men and their nymphomaniac associate get on the night train running from somewhere in Germany to Italy. They rape one girl, drive another to jump off the train, then go spend some time with the latter girl's parents.

It's always difficult to figure out performances in a movie that's been dubbed, even when the dubbing is good, as it is here. I thought this one might have inspired Michael Haneke's FUNY GAMES but concluded that there's very little sense of drama or black humor in it. Instead, it wound up about horrid people doing horrid things for no clear reason -- I don't believe "They're psychopaths!" to be sufficient motivation absent other items of interest, and there weren't any here. This was rejected for a theatrical license in Great Britain when it first was released. I do not approve of censorship, but can certainly understand why. I cannot recommend this movie except to those who enjoy blood sport solely for the gore.

Lisa and Margaret are two sweet, if less than innocent teenagers taking a train ride across the European countryside on Christmas Eve. The unlucky pair run afoul of a couple of vicious sleazy thugs and an icy cold wealthy woman on board the train who proceed to rape, torment, debase and eventually murder poor Lisa and Margaret. Director/co-writer Aldo Lado wrings plenty of gut-wrenching claustrophobic tension from the edgy, unsettling story, adroitly creates a gritty, threatening atmosphere rife with sadism and perversion, addresses the troubling issue of random everyday gratuitous violence with truly jolting results, and delivers a few savagely powerful moments of startling brutality (the sequence where the virginal Lisa gets gruesomely violated with a knife is especially ugly and upsetting). The performances are uniformly excellent: Irene Miracle and Laura D'Angelo make for very attractive and appealing fair damsels in distress while Flavio Bucci and Gianfranco De Grassi are frightfully credible and disgusting as the greasy low-life criminal villains who are memorably first seen in the picture beating up a sidewalk Santa for his money. But top acting honors clearly go to the strikingly lovely blonde Macha Meril, who gives a positively chilling portrayal of the cruel, haughty rich bitch who gladly joins in on the hoodlum's ferocious degradation of Lisa and Margaret. Gabor Pogany's slick, handsome cinematography works wonders with the tightly confined setting while the great Ennio Morricone supplies a typically haunting, throbbing and melodic score. Demis Roussos' beautiful ballad "A Flower Is All You Need" is used as an achingly ironic bookend for all the harsh barbarism. A nice'n'nasty Euroslime exploitation thriller.

Aldo Lado's Night Train Murders, an Italian clone of Wes Craven's infamous horror Last House on the Left (1972),is a repugnant and sleazy little shocker which, although it doesn't offer much in the way of gore, is still fairly effective thanks to its (mostly) non-explicit, but still very disturbing, scenes of sexual violence.

Anyone familiar with Craven's movie should know exactly what to expect from this one, since it doesn't try to add anything remotely original to the story—two pretty girls, Margaret (Irene Miracle) and Lisa (Laura D'Angelo),travelling home by train at Christmas, are raped and killed, but, by a twist of fate, the perpetrators of the crime end up at the house of the murdered teens' family, where they eventually receive a taste of their own medicine—however Aldo still manages to deliver a powerful movie that, if anything, succeeds in showing the audience the true ugliness of senseless violence.

After a fairly dreadful Demis Roussos theme song, a rather drawn-out preamble introduces us to the two cuties who will end up wishing they'd taken a plane home, and the vile threesome who mercilessly torture them to death: Blackie and Curly, a couple of lowlife thugs, and a middle-class, but sadistic, woman. At about the forty minute mark, the nastiness finally kicks in and the film earns its reputation as a vicious little sucker: Aldo presents a series of tense and ugly scenes of humiliation which culminate in one of the girls being stabbed in the cooch whilst the other leaps from the train onto some rocks.

Unfortunately, after these well realised and genuinely unnerving moments, the film finishes rather unsatisfactorily with only the two guys getting their comeuppance—the woman gets away with her crimes. Furthermore, a peeping tom, who spies on the girls being tortured and gets to join in on the fun for a while, also escapes retribution.

Now I realise that in real life not everyone gets what they deserve, but with this being a rape/revenge flick, I expected a decent amount of revenge to follow the rape. With only half of the sleaze-bags in Night Train Murders ending up regretting their actions, I couldn't help but feel a bit cheated.

Because of this reason, Night Train Murders, even with its superior production values, better acting and melancholy Morricone soundtrack, doesn't quite manage to equal the film it emulates.