A Bring Out the GIMP (Girls in Merciless Peril) Movie Review


Night Train Murders

Reviewed by Ralphus


I wanted to let the board know about a mainstream movie I just rented from Netflix, a 1975 video nasty called Night Train Murders. Almost everybody around here knows about Last House on the Left, a classic of its type (although personally I'm not a fan). Well, this is basically the same movie, except it's a whole lot better. The plot concerns two young women who are held captive, tortured and killed by 2 men and a woman. The main difference is that in LHOTL, it was in the woods, and in this film, it's on a train. Also, where there was brief bondage in the former, no one gets tied up here. But there are highlights a plenty, and a lot of modern-day bondage films could learn a lesson in tone from watching this movie. It's extremely mean to its young pretty victims, and that made it most entertaining for me.

Start off with 2 sweet and innocent girls. One is an actual virgin played by Laura D'Angelo and the other is the super-cute Irene Miracle (who memorably exposed her breasts through a glass prison viewing booth to Brad Davis near the end of Midnight Express...anybody who's seen that film will recall that scene). They meet up with two lowlife thugs, guys you can tell are bad because they're seen mugging Santa Claus in the first 3 minutes of the movie.

Aboard a train, one of the thugs follows an older lady passenger (Macha Méril) into the restroom and attempts to rape her, but she's so thrilled with the idea of being taken that she consents to his actions and they end up making love right there. And inexplicably, she ends up not only joining the thugs in their attack on the girls, but actually encouraging them and egging them on to do more. As imposing as the 2 thugs are, her character is the scariest villain in the movie. There's just something about a woman who shows no mercy toward members of her own sex, especially when females are supposed to take empathy in one another. Not this bitch, no way.

One of the thugs takes a knife and slices off a hunk of Laura's hair and then sniffs it (a particularly creepy way to show he's nuts) and, having gotten a scent of her female essence, he decides to come back for the real thing by attacking her and trying to force himself on her. She knees him in the groin while Irene tries to escape, but both get beaten up for their actions.

"You're such a silly girl, you're asking to be beaten up," the older lady comments. "We just want to have fun, nothing more".

The thug forces the virgin to give him a handjob, and then the older lady tells her she should remove her panties, or else they'll be removed for her. Irene's character is forced to remove her lower clothing, as well.

Then get this. An old codger happens by and starts watching the humiliation of the girls through the window. They see him spying and open up the door and tell him to join the fun. Rather than go to the police, he actually takes them up on their offer and rapes Irene himself! Yeah, party time!

After the peeping tom leaves, the older lady mockingly berates the other girl, and when she finds out she's a virgin, she encourages the men to find out if she's lying. She holds her hand over the virgin's mouth and tells the crazy thug to give it to her. He tries to rape her, but she's too tight, so he decides to take her virginity another way...with his knife! The other thug tries to intervene, but the older lady calmly says "Hey, we'll only cut her a little".

You can guess what happens next. She gets a knife through her pussy (not as gross and bloody as you might think) and dies, as her horrified friend watches in shock. Irene runs away, and we get an eyeful as the men pursue her, as she's running through the halls with her beaver fully exposed (take THAT, Sharon Stone!) She locks herself in a bathroom and as the men pound on the door to break it down, she jumps out the train window, choosing death over certain torture. The men also throw the virgin's body out the train window and that finishes up our fun, setting up the inevitable revenge finale in the film's final third.

I was surprised that a film with no actual bondage could turn me on so much, but it works extremely well as both a horror movie and as a GIMP film. Like the best bondage movies, it gets its power through excellent casting and performances. The victims are both cute and act convincingly scared, and with 3 strong villains, you feel a lot of their fear as the tension builds and builds. There's not really much blood and gore to get in the way (and surprisingly not a lot of nudity, considering it was made in the liberal 1970s). This one is a real find, a girls in peril exploitation movie that gets it right. Definitely worth checking out.


My Grade: A-

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