"Night Train Murders" (AKA "Don't Ride on Late Night Trains," "Xmas Massacre," "Last House on the Left 2," and at least five other titles) is a seedy little torture flick made in the long ago days before "torture porn" became all the rage in Hollywood horror. It brought a smirk to my lips to hear people lambaste Roland Joffé in 2006 for his lurid ad campaign for the craptastic "Captivity," an ad campaign which showed a prone woman being tortured. People moaned and wailed about this ad campaign being sick and in poor taste and appealing to the baser human desire to watch suffering, etc, and while all those things are true, that movie is far from the first movie to use the promise of torture to lure viewers in. "Last House on the Left" did it 20 years before "Captivity" graced the world with its presence, and the cheap little "Night Train Murders," thrown together cheaply and released stateside to cash in on the torture and murder trend set by films like "Last House,", did likewise.

Of course, whatever your thoughts on "Last House on the Left," director Wes Craven claims that he was at least attempting to say something meaningful with his film, and I can catch glimpses of something deeper in the material when I watch that film. "Night Train Murders" has no hints at such things, but does that mean it is unenjoyable? On the contrary, I found much to enjoy with "Night Train Murders." While the first half hour is painfully slow and boring, once the two main girls are captured and the mayhem begins, the movie has many chilling moments. The two lead girls in the film are innocent and naive to a fault, rich kids who have obviously been sheltered from the dangers of the outside world, and thus they make a lot of dumb moves that ensure that no one will know of their plight until it is too late.

She is clearly more intelligent than they, and it's pretty sickening to watch, actually. Several times throughout the film we think the girls are going to be rescued, but people either turn a blind eye to what is obviously a criminal situation or, in one memorable scene, they join in on the festivities. If this movie has a moral, it's that the majority of people are a bunch of reprobates who take joy in seeing others suffer. The men start out using the women for sex, but once they learn to enjoy the feeling of power the ravaging gets worse and worse until suddenly there is no turning back. I wonder if that was their intention from the beginning, or if when given carte blanche to do whatever they wanted to another human being they simply lost control.

That thought is disturbing enough (as are the circumstances of this escalation of violence and degradation, though I am amused to see someone "bleed to death" and leave roughly a tablespoon of blood on the floor of the train. I do believe the human body holds a bit more blood than that). Of course then comes the "twist ending" which should come as no surprise to any grindhouse fan, and even though all the violence happens onscreen it still doesn't pack the same power as the similar conclusion to "Last House on the Left." There's a little too much testosterone in this ending for my taste. Of course the man hunts the killers down, of course the woman cowers and whines, of course we can't kill a woman because she's weak and therefore she must be telling the truth when she says she's innocent. If this conclusion has a deeper meaning at all it's probably supposed to be ironic, but it's just a let down to those of us who have suffered under the performance of this miserable harpy for the last hour and fifty minutes hoping we would see her killed.

This movie isn't as good as it could be, but it's probably as good as it should be, and for getting under my skin the way it does, I have to recommend it. It's flawed but worthwhile for fans of grindhouse, if only to note how many movies have ripped off scenes from this movie in the years since its release (which is especially fun since the movie itself was a derivative rip off).