Aldo Lado’s Late Night Trains (L’ultimo treno della notte, 1975) arrived at the height of Italy’s exploitation boom, a time when filmmakers weren’t shy about pushing boundaries. A clear product of the era’s fascination with transgressive horror, the film wears its influences on its sleeve—most notably Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left (1972). While it doesn’t reinvent the formula, Late Night Trains still manages to carve out its own identity, delivering a nihilistic nightmare that lingers in the mind, even as it struggles to justify its existence beyond sheer brutality.

The setup is all too familiar: Two young women, Margaret and Lisa, board a train home for Christmas, unaware that their holiday journey will become a waking nightmare. As the train moves through the cold European night, they fall prey to two sadistic criminals and a demented woman who seems to relish the violence as much as they do. The film unfolds as an exercise in cruelty, culminating in the expected revenge-fueled third act.

Lado’s direction is both slick and suffocating, using the cramped confines of the train to heighten the claustrophobia. Unlike Craven’s grimy, almost documentary-like approach, Late Night Trains boasts a more polished aesthetic, with an unsettling score by Ennio Morricone that contrasts its horrors with an eerie, melancholic beauty. This visual and auditory elegance makes the film’s brutality hit even harder, though it never quite transcends its exploitation roots.

Where Late Night Trains stumbles is in its lack of depth. While The Last House on the Left (for all its flaws) attempted to grapple with themes of cyclical violence and societal decay, Lado’s film largely exists to shock. The social commentary feels tacked on rather than fully explored, and the violence, while effectively harrowing, leaves little room for nuance. Still, as a piece of grindhouse cinema, it succeeds in delivering an experience that’s undeniably disturbing.

Fifty years later, Late Night Trains remains a controversial and haunting film, albeit one that struggles to differentiate itself from the many Last House imitators of the era. It’s a rough watch—not just for its unrelenting cruelty but for its sense of inevitability. There’s no escape here, just an unrelenting descent into torment. While not a masterpiece of the genre, its cold, methodical savagery ensures that once seen, it’s not easily forgotten.

• Saul Muerte