6. Night Train Murders (1975)
Basically Last House on the Left set on a train, Night Train Murders gained notoriety as a Video Nasty in Britain in the early 1980s. I have the release from Shameless Screen Entertainment - passed uncut in 2008. Two girls - Margaret and Lisa - are travelling by train from Germany to Italy to spend Christmas with Lisa's family. The girls become the target of abuse and degradation when they draw the attention of Blackie and Curly - two hoodlums on the lam. There is also a very posh lady - never named - who somehow thinks that terrorising these girls is fun (maybe sexually arousing) therefore she forms an alliance with the hoodlums. Lisa is forced to masturbate Blackie. Curly tries to rape Lisa but cannot get past her hymen. He shoves a knife up her vagina so viciously, Lisa bleeds to death. Margaret makes a desperate bid for escape only to be thrown off the train in the process and killed. The woman is ticked off at this turn of events and gets into a physical fight with Blackie. And then pure Last House on the Left-dom plays out as Lisa's parents assist the blonde woman with the injuries she sustained in her fight with Blackie. They see the hoodlums loitering and Lisa's mother recognises the tie one of them is wearing, as the tie Lisa had told her she was going to give to her father for Christmas. Hearing that their daughter was found dead on a rail track on the radio, Lisa's parents mete out justice for her killers a la Mari's parents in Last House. The fate of the posh woman is undecided at the end of the film but Blackie and Curly are violently killed. I enjoyed Late Night Trains. Initially I expected a crappy rip off that would bore the boobies of me, but although it clearly uses the Last House on the Left formula, it is distinctively nasty enough to be viewed as a film in its own right and the character development is much better in Late Night Trains than Craven's film. The debasement, humiliation and killing of the girls is very unpleasant to watch, but what is most interesting is the Posh bird character played by Macha Meril who turns a violent sexual assault upon her into an opportunity for pleasure. She evidently enjoys the sadism against the girls. It is debatable whether the violence that Blackie and Curly doled out would have been less without the lady's perverse encouragement. And in the end she seems to get away with it! That was a nice little twist. A minor masterpiece.