Aldo Lado’s film L’ultimo treno della notte (1975) is one of those truly shocking and disturbing exploitation features made in the seventies. Lado based L’ultimo treno della notte on the films Jungfrukällan (1960) and The Last House On The Left (1972), with the former providing the basis of the third act of Lado’s film while the later provided the premise of the second act. Lado, like Bo Arne Vibenius, equates the violence of the exploitation film with fascism and postulates that the only way to resist it is through a kind of vigilantism.
L’ultimo treno della notte follows Margaret (Irene Miracle) and Lisa (Laura D’Angelo) as they make their way to Lisa’s parent’s, Dr. Stradi (Enrico Maria Salerno) and Laura (Marina Berti), home in Italy via train. While Lisa’s parents host a traditional Christmas party Margaret and Lisa are assaulted, terrorized, mutilated and murdered by a pair of depraved lunatics (Gianfranco De Grass and Flavio Bucci) led by a mysterious woman (Macha Méril). Through happenstance, Lisa’s parents end up taking the killers in on Christmas day only to uncover their involvement in their daughter’s demise.
The most affecting and provocative aspect of L’ultimo treno della notte is Lado’s use of cross-cutting between the events on the train and that of the traditional Christmas at home. In the first act of L’ultimo treno della notte Christmas preparations are juxtaposed with the various conversations that Lisa and Margaret overhear and participate in on the train. This discourse is distinctly pro-fascist and serves as an ominous counterpoint to the traditional Catholic values on display in the Stradi home.
In the second act of L’ultimo treno della notte fascist discourse is transformed into the most vile of physical actions as Lisa and Margaret are assaulted and killed. These grotesque images of terror provide a subversive contrast to the images of a Christmas feast at the Stradi household and a lively, politically progressive debate concerning child psychology and society’s complicity in violence. It’s in this portion of the film that the visual juxtaposition is its most blunt and unsettling. Yet, the demented spectacle that Aldo Lado has orchestrated reveals the means by which fascism comes to power while also serving as a twisted sort of climax to the rhetoric espoused in the first act of the film.
When L’ultimo treno della notte reaches its third and final act the events of the train and the Stradi home come together in an eruption of vigilante violence. Dr. Stradi’s systematic execution of the two thugs is as cathartic as it is pointless. Stradi allows the mystery woman to live and escape, essentially turning a blind eye to the leader of this fascist regime in microcosm. The pair of thugs were the creatures of action so an equal, opposite action was enacted on them.
Lado seems to suggest that fascism survives because justice can only see action, not thought. The climax of L’ultimo treno della notte ties in directly with a conversation overheard on the train in the first act in which a professor proposes that a totalitarian political regime is the solution to European political disharmony and terrorism. If the Stradi family represents liberalism it’s an ineffective liberalism that fails to eradicate fascism. The political messaging of L’ultimo treno della notte is about as subtle as its images of sexual violence and gore.
