Further thoughts on… Train to Busan & Seoul Station (Sang-ho Yeon, 2016)

 For a film that initially seems such an exercise in conceptual simplicity, there certainly seems to be a lot to say about Sang-ho Yeon’s South Korean zombie hit ‘Train to Busan’.

My initial review of the film, which I posted here last month, was bashed out in note form almost immediately after my first viewing, and I have subsequently grown to feel that the criticisms I expressed therein were quite unfair, and that I failed to really get to grips with what the film is trying to say – hence the necessity of a revisit.

A repeat viewing (paying closer attention, in different company) left me considerably more impressed by the scope of the film’s socio-political message, and by its (perhaps deliberate?) rejection of the cynical individualism that has come to define post-Romero zombie films.

Additionally, correspondence with the estimable Grant Balfour drew my attention to his thoughts on the film, posted a while back on his equally estimable zombie-theory blog Brian Tasting. As part of a wider exploratory work of (if you will) ‘zombie theory’, this piece is naturally framed in rather different terms to the kind of excitable blather we specialise in here, but it is thought-provoking reading nonetheless, and helped spark a few synapses with regard to the interpretation of the film which follows.

And finally, on the recommendation of reader Ian Smith (who commented on my first review), I have also recently purchased and watched ‘Train To Busan’s prequel / companion piece, the animated feature ‘Seoul Station’, and I am very glad I did so.

Not only is ‘Seoul Station’ excellent (one of the most impressive exemplars of “realistic” animation I’ve seen to date, it is very nearly the match of its live action counterpart in terms of action, scripting, human drama etc), but I was also startled by how pointedly different it is to ‘Train To Busan’ – so much so in fact that it almost feels as if it could have been produced to specifically address the kind of concerns I raised in my initial review of the latter.

I realise that this is a slightly disingenuous way of looking at things, given that the two projects were clearly produced in parallel (IMDB suggests that ‘..Station’ actually premiered two months before ‘Train..’), but the extent to which they function as “two sides of the same coin”, each seeming to address potential issues that an audience may have with the other, is remarkable.

In an attempt to convey my thoughts on all this is a coherent fashion, I’m going to split what follows into two parts – firstly, a new take on ‘Train To Busan’, specifically aiming to look at it in the context of the post-Romero zombie tradition, and secondly, a consideration of ‘Seoul Station’, and the way in which it’s drastically different approach moderates the ideas put forward in ‘Train..’.


1. TRAIN (AGAIN).

As you may recall, one of my initial arguments re: ‘Train to Busan’ was that the film essentially removes the zombie sub-genre from the horror genre that gave birth to it, replacing the always somewhat existential terrors of a horror film with a more uplifting, “survival against the odds” narrative reminiscent of a disaster movies in the ‘70s ‘Poseidon Adventure’ / ‘Towering Inferno’ tradition. (1)

Although as a horror fan I initially had mixed feelings about this change of emphasis, I now tend to believe that it actually represents a refreshing step forward for the sub-genre in some ways, allowing ‘..Busan’ to mount a more significant challenge to our expectations of zombie cinema than its no frills plot may initially suggest.

Tracing this way back, I suppose you could say that the horror film has always basically been predicated upon ideas of sadism and voyeurism, and upon the violent disruption of quote-unquote “normal” human relationships - transgressive monsters-from-the-id running rampant, Freudian nightmares and all of that sort of thing.

Being horror films first and foremost, zombie films have naturally tended to reflect this, and their destructive/transgressive themes have become particularly amplified with regard to family relationships, partly at least I think because prime instigator George Romero had a real bee in his bonnet about family stuff. (Look at Romero’s non-zombie films for instance, and you’ll note that there are very few which do not use people having a bad time with their relatives as a central plot point.)

As a result, the ‘heroes’ of Romero's zombie films are pretty much always loners or loose groups of free-ranging individuals, whilst family responsibilities are conversely seen as a burden - as something which will drag people down and destroy them - and most subsequent zombie films have been happy to follow this lead. (2)

‘Train to Busan’ will probably be criticised by horror fans (including myself) as a kind a “zombie-lite” confection - with mainstream popular appeal and little in the way of gory or upsetting content – but I am now more inclined to argue that this perceived lack of “guts” (whether figurative or literal) should not be confused with an attempt on the part of the filmmakers to side-step the thematic complexity and serious dramatic intent necessary to sincerely convey this harrowing tale of unimaginable awfulness.

As Grant concisely states in his Tractatus (linked above):
“The site of difference for Train to Busan is located in the thematic zone of family.”

Indeed, ‘..Busan’ is perhaps the only canonical post-Romero zombie film I am familiar with in which familial relationships are seen as a source of strength and inspiration for the able-bodied, adult characters, rather than one of constriction, vulnerability and, ultimately, doom.

Upon repeat viewing, it becomes clear that the film’s occasionally soap opera-ish ‘family stuff’ is not mere the kind of space-filling, set up stuff we expect from a horror movie. Rather than simply existing in order to ensure our emotions are appropriately manipulated alongside our jangled nerves once the monsters are on the rampage, it is instead the very heart of the thing, just as much as it is in, say, ‘Don’t Look Now’ [to remain in-horror, but non-zombie].

Once this is established furthermore, ‘..Busan’ proceeds to follow an admittedly familiar disaster movie / survival horror pattern in demonstrating the way in which flesh-and-blood family relationships can become easily mutable, their accompanying responsibilities transferable, during times of crisis.

Whereas many filmmakers may be have been apt to present Seok-woo (Yoo Gong)’s determination to protect his daughter at all costs during the early part of the film in an uncritical, positive light, director Sang-ho Yeon instead goes to great lengths to ensure that his protagonist’s decision to prioritise the safety of his own father/daughter unit at the expense of helping others is repeatedly shown up as both selfish, and, more to the point, ineffectual. (Slight cognitive dissonance may result here for viewers used to accepting Hollywood’s traditional doctrine of unearned exceptionalism.)

Through his interactions with the film’s other survivors (most particularly, with the parallel two-person family unit represented by Dong-seok Ma and his pregnant wife Yu-mi Jung) Seok-woo gradually learns how easily protective family can be transferred and reshaped for the benefit of all, whenever survival is threatened.

Given that Seok-woo’s most pointed critic on this matter is his own daughter, and that subsequent events lead him to what (avoiding spoilers) can only be described as a full-scale Damascene conversion, the film could scarcely have made its point re: the benefits of collective rather than unilateral action any more clearly.

Through this collective redistribution of responsibility, it is shown that those traditionally seen as a survival-threatening ‘burden’ in zombie cinema (children, the elderly, pregnant women) can be whisked forward toward safety with comparative ease, bypassing the inevitable path toward grim, basement apocalypse that ‘Night of the Living Dead’ has forever etched in our mind as the natural fate of the rigidly inflexible family unit. (3)

By completely overturning this Romero / horror film paradigm, by portraying love and family responsibility - and beyond them, simply fellow humanity - as something that actually drives people to greater feats of survival and self-sacrifice, ‘Train to Busan’ can actually thus be seen as a very brave and innovative addition to what is traditionally an extremely cynical and misanthropic sub-genre.

If ‘Night of the Living Dead’ provided a kind of ultimate “fuck you” to the nuclear family values and perceived social conformity of the 1950s, fifty years of subsequent zombie movies have hammered that point home so thoroughly that Romero’s proto-survivalist notions of pragmatic individualism, so shocking in their day, have now more or less become the norm across a whole swathe of popular genres. (4)

By pulling a complete 180 on this, at a time when the mainstream of culture and politics is arguably becoming more systematically cynical and hyper-individualistic than ever before, could ‘Train to Busan’ in some sense feel just as radical in 2018 as NOTLD did in 1968..?

Well, maybe I'm taking all this a bit too far, but, whichever way you look at it, my second viewing of ‘Train..’ makes clear that the film’s central message is a practical rather than sentimental one, and it is hammered home so relentlessly, so clearly, by the on-screen action that I feel like absolute blockhead for failing to accord it due prominence in my first review.

Refuting not just Romero but the all-too-common misinterpretation of that old chestnut about the plank from Matthew’s gospel, ‘Train to Busan’s message is: help others before you help yourself, otherwise all will perish.

It is not exactly a subtle message, or a new one, or one that is terribly difficult to grasp, but if we expand it beyond its immediate context and apply it to the perilous global situation we currently find ourselves in, it certainly makes a mockery of my earlier assertion that ‘Train to Busan’ lacks political clout.


2. STATION.

Moving on to ‘Seoul Station’, the differences between ‘Train to Busan’ and its animated “prequel” are so self-evident they barely need to be stated. Developed in parallel by the same writer-director and producers, the two projects are clearly designed to function as thematic opposites in just about every respect, from the train / station dichotomy evident in the films’ titles right through to their underlying moral philosophy, and the vision they present of life in present day South Korea.

Whereas ‘Train..’s titular journey takes place in daylight, commencing in the early morning, the events of ‘..Station’ occur at night, allegedly beginning during the previous evening. (5)

Whereas the vast majority of the characters aboard the ‘Train..’ belong to the mainstream of society – predominantly middle-class, with recognisably ‘normal’ interpersonal relationships and at least enough money to travel between cities on a high speed train – those left back at the ‘..Station’ are, without exception, rejects from that society - the homeless, the destitute, runaways, criminals and lowly service sector employees, all essentially friendless and alone in the world. (6)

Whereas the filmmakers’ depiction of the reaction of the authorities to the zombie threat remains ambiguous (or rather, irrelevant) in ‘Train..’, the attempts of state security forces to respond to the outbreak in ‘..Station’ are shown to be as incompetent, inhumane and catastrophic as anything in Romero’s filmography.

Whereas family relationships sit at the heart of the drama in ‘Train..’, imbuing its characters with strength and heroism, the few interpersonal relationships depicted in ‘..Station’ are sketchy, abusive or transient arrangements which tend to conclude in the most horribly upsetting manner imaginable.

In fact, whereas ‘Train..’ could be accused by horror fans of soft-pedalling on both the social criticism and transgressive violence stipulated by the Romero zombie film blueprint, ‘..Station’ presents us not only with an excess of repellent imagery but also a plotline which more or less consists entirely of social criticism, much of it expressed in bitterly angry, unflinching terms.

Whereas the dramatic high notes in ‘Train..’ are provided by scenes of noble, heroic self-sacrifice, the emotional core of ‘..Station’ is instead represented by a scene in which an elderly homeless man and a teenage runaway weep uncontrollably in an empty subway tunnel, each lamenting their inability to return to a home that no longer exists. (A circumstance which, crucially, could have played out in exactly the same manner even without the intervention of flash-eating zombies.)

Indeed, in terms of the kind of grand metaphors that inevitably accompany post-Romero zombie films, ‘Seoul Station’ most directly addresses the theme of homelessness (in both the literal and archetypical senses of the word).

We spend a great deal of time during the early part of the film in the company of the homeless population who subsist in and around the station. It is grim, cheerless stuff, and, presumably, one of the main reasons why ‘..Station’ seems to have failed to match the commercial momentum of ‘Train..’, as Yeon captures that dull ache of guilt that always accompanies first-hand encounters with homelessness all too well.

As we experience the faceless coldness with which the entreaties of the homeless are dismissed by the harried security guards and cleaners who represent the only fellow humans who are actually obliged to deal with them, and, subsequently, the way in which their increasingly urgent concerns re: the imminent zombie apocalypse are ignored and belittled, we begin to understand that, for these homeless characters, the moneyed commuters who more-or-less step over their bodies on a daily basis have become so distant and unrelatable that the transition to dealing with flesh-eating zombies is only further degree or two down the ladder from their usual day-to-day.

And, conversely, when the over-worked and underpaid station staff eventually figure out what’s going on, they can’t help but see the zombie onslaught as an (admittedly alarming) escalation of the problem represented by the homeless hordes who are usually banging on their perplex doors day and night with complaints and requests for help.

If all this sounds as if it could be adding up to a pretty preachy zombie movie, well, let’s just say that ‘Seoul Station’ benefits – fairly remarkably, given its status as an animation - from some instances of carefully nuanced characterisation that help the film to engage with the complexity of the issues it is addressing, preventing it from becoming a mere exercise in hand-wringing guilt.

Far from the down-on-his-luck saint of Hollywood hobo tradition, the (nameless?) homeless man whom we follow through the early portion of the film, as he attempts to alert the authorities to the fact that his “buddy” is in the process of contracting the zombie virus, is a painfully damaged and clueless individual. Precisely the kind of irresolvable, walking problem that anyone who has ever worked behind a counter or helped out at a chairty will instinctively dread the approach of, the personal failings that have led him to his lowly position in life are, sadly, just as clear as the societal ones.

Given that this man is one of the few characters in the film who is sufficiently good-natured to actually try to help others before himself moreover, the fact that his efforts are so completely ineffectual feels like a pointedly cynical rejoinder to the humanitarian message of ‘Train to Busan’.

Likewise, I was impressed by the brief scene in which several characters get into an altercation with the commanding officer of a police unit busy confining civilian survivors to a kind of perilous no man’s land between their riot shields and the zombie hordes. Far from the kind of doltish, authoritarian strawmen whose thoughtless actions serve to rouse our anger in Romero’s films, the guy who is reluctantly calling the shots in this particular clusterfuck is actually very relatable.

A tired, worried man doggedly obliged to pursue the strategy decided upon by his superiors against what we assume to be his own gut feeling, he takes off his glasses and rubs his eyes as our protagonists berate him, momentarily defusing the situation by quietly talking to them on the level, more or less telling them that there is no chance of a good resolution here, so they might as well just beat it and forget about their friends behind the barricade.

With an admirable lack of subtlety that yet again puts me in mind of Romero, ‘Seoul Station’s conclusion sees the film’s few exhausted survivors limping their way into an actual complex of newly built, “dream home” demo apartments, there to enact a shocking, plot twist-driven conclusion that seems more like the kind of thing that might have played out in an early Takashi Miike yakuza movie than something we’d expect from the director of ‘Train to Busan’ – a conclusion furthermore in which, once again, the close proximity of flesh-eating zombies is largely incidental.

If ‘Seoul Station’ and ‘Train to Busan’ have anything in common in fact, it is the use of the zombies as an impersonal force of nature, rather than as a gothic horror-derived atavistic / existential menace. (The conclusion to ‘..Station’ may admittedly have a certain gothic kick to it, but it is one delivered solely by the human characters.)

In both films, the zombies essentially function as a mechanism for accelerating pre-existing tensions and relationships between human beings, taking them straight to their natural conclusion, stripping away the months, years or decades it may have taken for the characters to reach this point of mutual understanding or closure in zombie-free circumstances; a conclusion which the filmmakers’ manage to frame in euphoric, ultimately uplifting terms in ‘Train..’, and, well… quite the opposite in ‘..Station’.

It will be up to the viewer, I suppose, to decide which is the more impressive of the two achievements, but more impressive than either is the realisation that it is not really a choice. Taken together, ‘Seoul Station’ and ‘Train to Busan’ comprise a more cohesive cinematic Yin-Yang than I can recall ever previously seeing from two parallel / sequential films by the same director. Just as there can be no good in life without the bad, either half of this two-film equation feels slightly empty without the other; as in life itself, you’ve got to take ‘em both, or let them go.

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(1) Echoing my own observation about the zombies in the film functioning like a tidal wave, my wife’s immediate reaction to watching the film for the first time was to insist that it must have been intended as a fictional response to the East Asian tsunami of 2011, giving voice to the filmmakers’ belief that people need to work together for their mutual benefit in such situations, rather than prioritising individual safety. 

The likelihood of this may be slightly undermined by the fact that the Korean peninsula was largely unaffected by the 2011 tsunami, and indeed has suffered mercifully little damage from major natural disasters during the 21st century thus far, but I definitely take her point re: the film’s likely real world inspirations and wider narrative intent.

(In a horrible irony meanwhile, my brief research on this point revealed that the city of Busan was actually hit by a typhoon in the same month ‘Train to Busan’ premiered.) 

(2) The only exception to this I can think of is the pregnant woman who makes a getaway in the helicopter at the end of ‘Dawn of the Dead’... something that is perhaps being vaguely referenced by the ending to ‘..Busan’, now that I think about it, even as it simultaneously throws a humanist raspberry towards the more famous ending of ‘Night of the Living Dead’.

(3) For an even more potent demonstration of the way in which ‘Train to Busan’ upturns the universe according to Romero, contrast the portrayal of the parallel male/female couple and father/daughter units in ‘..Busan’ with the singularly horrible fates suffered by their direct counterparts in what is arguably Romero’s most powerful (certainly most under-rated) apocalyptic film, 1973’s ‘The Crazies’.

(4) There is probably a wider point to be navel-gazed here re: the notion that the primary legacy of the beat / hippie counter-culture that crested at around the same time NOTLD saw release actually had nothing to do with greater social freedoms or the expansion of pacifist/humanist causes, but was instead centred around the widespread celebration of *individuality*, as contrasted with the perceived consensus conformity of earlier generations. The very same celebration of individual agency, which, in its nefarious alignment with the machinations of advanced capitalism, many would claim is now slowly killing us all fifty years down the line, perhaps…? (2,000 words on this on my desk in time for next week’s lesson, please class!)

(5) Whilst I don’t want to interrupt the main text with such nit-picking, I’ve nonetheless got to take some time to address the fact that the time-frame within which these two films co-exist really doesn’t seem to make a great deal of sense, whichever way you look at it.

During the night in which ‘Seoul Station’ takes place, the zombie outbreak is seen to reach fairly apocalyptic severity long before the sun rises, with the area around the station entirely abandoned to the zombie hordes. As such, the idea that a full compliment of passengers gathered to board a train there the following morning without noticing anything is amiss until after they have departed is, frankly, impossible to accept. (I mean, I’m not going to let this spoil my enjoyment of two very good films or anything, but, y’know – just sayin’.)

(6) As Ian Smith points out in his comment on my original post, the traumatised homeless man who sneaks aboard the train in ‘Train to Busan’ seems to represents the only “crossover” between the worlds of the two films.

October Horrors # 7: Train To Busan (Sang-ho Yeon, 2016)

So, seems like this one pretty much knocked it outta the park as far as South Korean zombie movies go, right?

I actually first became aware of ‘Train to Busan’ a few years ago, when a freelance work assignment required me to do a bit of research on international box office figures. Scanning through the resulting info, I was surprised to see that a home-grown horror film had recently become the highest grossing film of all time in South Korean cinemas. I mean, not just the highest grossing South Korean film in South Korea – the highest grossing film from any country. Avatar, Avengers, Star Wars, whatever – ‘Train To Busan’ smoked them all in the domestic market.

Not bad for a movie that, on the face of it, sticks pretty faithfully to the post-Romero template of grim, zombie-initiated societal collapse, and an achievement that would surely have been unthinkable for this kind of film twenty years ago.

I’m sure I am far from the first person to reflect on how peculiar it is that the idea of malevolent, reanimated corpses eating the raw flesh of the living has become an acceptable subject for mainstream entertainment in the 21st century, but in many ways, ‘Train to Busan’ feels like a new crowning achievement for this trend.

For ‘Train to Busan’ is, make no mistake, a mainstream film. The use of a post-‘28 Days Later’ infection paradigm allows the story’s unimaginably hellish scenario to be portrayed with a bare minimum of gore and bodily corruption, whilst viewers are encouraged to sympathise and/or identify with the central characters through such positive, universal sentiments as concern for family, friendship, co-operation and self-sacrifice.

The complicated networks of sadism, cynicism and voyeuristic prurience that usually define the relationship between viewers, filmmakers and on-screen characters in horror films are never really put into operation here, whilst the ‘monsters-from-the-id’ psychological transgressions that are traditionally key to the appeal of the genre are likewise scrubbed off the film’s squeaky clean surface until only a trace memory of their presence remains.

But, if there are to be mainstream zombie films, I’d nevertheless argue that ‘Train to Busan’ provides a pretty good model for how they can be done well.

I’d not sure how to best put this, but… that aforementioned lack of cynicism actually feels very refreshing. After a few decades in which even the most innocuous Hollywood action-adventure films (and, by extension, their Asian and European equivalents) seem to have been populated by wise-cracking, self-interested loud-mouths, there is something very appealing about following a group of people who are for the most part quite reasonable, soft-spoken and quote-unquote “normal” as they team up to deal with catastrophic, life-threatening circumstances.

In this respect, I can easily see why the film proved so appealing to a general audience – particularly in South Korea, where viewers could presumably relate even more directly to the surroundings and pre-zombie day-to-day concerns of their on-screen surrogates.

It helps too that the film is extremely well-made. Performances are generally convincing and character stuff is well-handled, despite touches of the hand-wringing familial melodrama that seems to be a ubiquitous part of Korean popular culture, and though not as traumatic as it may have been in a “proper”, full strength genre film, the sense of sudden, near-total apocalypse, and the eerie dislocation felt by passengers trapped in the orderly, hermetic environment of a high-speed, inter-city train whilst it unfolds, is very well conveyed.

Even in the era of smart phones and roaming wi-fi hotspots, the confused, second-hand fragments we receive of different locales being ‘quarantined’, of defences of cities having ‘failed’, and of more and more phonecalls to relatives and business contacts ringing out, dead, is extremely effective, building a very modern sense of slow-building, gut-tightening panic that I’d imagine must feel recognisable to anyone who has been unfortunate enough to find themselves adjacent to a terrorist atrocity, or a sudden outbreak of civil disobedience or warfare, in recent years.

Setting the film on a train, it must be said, is also a bit of a masterstroke. I say this for no other reason than that action-adventure scenarios set in or around trains have always had great cinematic potential, as has been proven whenever the necessary factors of budgetary resource and filmmaking talent have aligned – and, whilst I’ll refrain from running through my extremely long list of “GREAT FILMS (OR PARTS OF FILMS) SET ON TRAINS”, I can happily confirm that ‘..Busan’ earns a deserved spot on said list, with its litany of life-and-death struggles with door locks, detached carriages, switching yard derailments and runaway engines feeling both satisfyingly exhilarating and… weirdly old fashioned, in a sense.

(I’m apt to wonder for instance whether the drivers on South Korea’s latest generation of high speed trains really communicate with their central control room solely via a crackly old radio set, as is portrayed here, but no matter – as far as the movies go, this is great stuff.)

Zombie-wise meanwhile, the blank-eyed, hissing, running/infection-spreading creatures of ‘Train to Busan’ may not add much to the sub-genre’s rich legacy, but where the film really distinguishes itself horror-wise is in portraying such a sheer mass of them. Obviously reflective of fears arising from life in the densely populated cities of South-East Asia, these swarming zombies are repeatedly seen smashing through plexi-glass windows in their hundreds - an undifferentiated tide of biting flesh - whilst the complex, multi-level geometry of the station buildings in which much of the action takes place even leads to several moments in which the confined creatures crash through a wall of glass and literally pour down from the skies - a veritable tidal wave of mindlessly animated, chomping death machines.

As alarming and impressive as all this is however, this complete de-humanisation of the zombie threat nonetheless feeds into what most horror fans will have realised fairly soon into the film’s run-time – namely, that ‘Train to Busan’ is far more of an action-adventure movie (disaster survival sub-category) than it is a horror picture.

By the time we reach the scene in which a small group of mis-matched (all male) characters use improvised weaponry and armour to fight their way through several zombie-infested train carriages in order to rescue their (female) dependants from a toilet cubicle elsewhere on the train, it had occurred to me that the threat our heroes were facing could basically be anything – aliens, Nazis, piranhas, lions, dinosaurs, whatever – and the drama would still play out in pretty much the same way. (1)

That’s not necessarily a criticism – it’s a great sequence, perhaps the highlight of the movie overall, superbly edited and full of rousing heroism, hair-raising suspense and Hawksian male bonding, and I was thoroughly on-board with it whilst watching.

In retrospect though, I miss the spikes. I miss the blunt nastiness, the pessimism, the misanthropy and raging despair. The splintered doorframe and raised gardening trowel of our shared zombie history is nowhere to be found here, my friends.

Far more so than the gore and nastiness though, ‘Train to Busan’s greatest loss in retooling the zombie movie to fit mainstream expectations comes from its jettisoning of the questioning of authority that was such a key element of the formula as defined by George Romero.

That’s not to say that ‘Train..’ is mere mindless entertainment, or that it lacks a social conscience, but it is notable I think that the film’s social commentary in confined solely to the level of individual (rather than societal) morality.

A running dialogue continues throughout the film concerning the respective merits of self-preservation vs collective responsibility, whilst, more specific perhaps to the film’s South Korean identity, Dong-seok Ma’s two-fisted working class hero gives Yoo Gong’s salaryman protagonist a hard time about the “parasitic” nature of his employment as a hedge fund manager, and Gong’s inability to maintain a functional family life alongside the demands of his job is also a central (if not exactly original) concern. (2)

All of which is well and good, but in the meantime, there is no real feeling here that the authorities (or indeed the evident inequalities of the nation’s ultra-capitalist society) are in any way to blame for the chaos and mass death resulting from the zombie outbreak. Though cities may be overwhelmed, misleading advice given to survivors, and soldiers and police may be transformed en masse into zombie predators, at no point do we get the impression that the powers-that-be are doing anything other than their very best to cope with this sudden and unprecedented cataclysm.

This is a far cry indeed from the bleak – and far more convincing - vision of confusion, cruelty and incompetence that Romero brought to the screen in ‘Dawn of the Dead’ and ‘The Crazies’. To my mind, ‘Train to Busan’ suffers greatly from the absence of this perspective, even whilst I appreciate that such a pessimistic approach may have been just too much for viewers in a nation as geo-politically precarious as South Korea -- at least assuming that the filmmakers’ (very UN-horror movie-like) intentions were indeed to avoid giving their viewers sleepless nights, and to instead encourage them to bring their friends and neighbours along to the next screening.

As a movie then, ‘Train to Busan’ is well made, thoroughly engaging and great entertainment – it’s well worth a watch, and you’ll probably want to invite your own friends and neighbours around to watch it a second time too. As a film however (and most particularly as a horror film)…. it leaves something to be desired.

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(1) I couldn’t really find a way to crow-bar this into the main text, but another specifically Korean element of ‘Train to Busan’ arises from the fact that it’s action is all *just a wee bit patriarchal*, in a manner that might seem slightly jarring to contemporary Western viewers. As well as the aforementioned scene in which the heroic dudes battle to rescue their women from the toilet, this reaches its nadir at the film’s conclusion, when – hilariously – a close-to-death male hero uses his last breaths to try to instruct a woman on how to drive a train (something he has no experience of himself); “now, I think this must be the brake..”, etc.

(2) Dong-seok Ma, incidentally, kicks ass in this movie. Hugely likeable, he reminded me somewhat of Shintaro Katsu, and I will happily watch any further films in which he stomps around looking sad and punching people.

Exploito All’Italiana: Night Train Murders (Aldo Lado, 1975)

In the course of writing previous reviews for this ‘Exploito All’Italiana’ thread, I’ve made frequent references to “the great Italian rip-off machine” and suchlike, but how are we supposed to respond on occasions when this “machine” upsets our patronising critical notions by delivering a “rip off” that is actually considerably better than the source film it is imitating…?

In qualifying this assertion, I should probably admit straight away that, influential and epochal though it may be, I’m not a fan of Wes Craven’s ‘The Last House On The Left’ (1972). If that means I have to hand in my badge at the front desk and surrender my right to pass judgement on exploitation movies, then so be it, but what can I say? When cinema gets down to the ‘Last House..’ level of nastiness, I’m basically just too nice for this game, and, unless there’s some reassuringly legit good filmic artistry to go along with the sleaze, I’m bailing out.

Which, conveniently, is exactly where Aldo Lado comes in, with his film ‘L'ultimo Treno Della Notte’ (‘Last Stop on the Night Train’, aka ‘Don't Ride on Late Night Trains’, ‘Torture Train’ and ‘Xmas Massacre’, but best known in the English speaking world simply as ‘Night Train Murders’), which hit Italian screens in April 1975.

As you might well expect given the thoughts expressed in the preceding paragraphs, I have previously tended to avoid Italy’s attempts to cash-in on ‘Last House On the Left’ like the proverbial plague, and ‘Late Night Trains’ is, undeniably, an imitation of ‘Last House..’.  In terms of plot synopsis in fact, the two films are virtually identical, with Lado adding little to Craven’s minimal rape/murder/revenge scenario beyond the addition of a train.

(Of course, Lado may well have claimed he was taking his inspiration from Inger Bergman’s ‘Virgin Spring’ (1960) – the original source for ‘Last House..’ – but no prizes for guessing whether it was Bergman or Craven’s box office that the producers had in mind when they took this particular project to market.)(1)

Thank heavens then that Aldo Lado was far from your typical exploito-sleaze merchant. In fact, he is a director I am increasingly inclined to regard as some kind of unheralded savant of Italian genre cinema, at least on the basis of the three films by him I have seen to date. His two gialli (1971’s ‘Short Night of the Glass Dolls’ and 1972’s ‘Who Saw Her Die?’) are among the best, and most unconventional, films that genre has to offer, and as such, it was Lado’s name (along with admiring comments from several critical voices whose opinions I value) that finally convinced me to take a deep breath and press play on ‘Night Train Murders’.

And, without wishing to sound too pompous about it, I’m very glad I did, because, as it turns out, this is a far more challenging and rewarding film than its subject matter, promotional material and unsavoury reputation would ever have led me to expect.

Certainly, there is little in the film’s lengthy opening sequence – a tightly edited montage of footage of the bustling, pre-Christmas shopping streets of Munich, set to Demis Roussos’s exuberantly good-natured pop hit ‘A Flower is All You Need’ – to suggest that we’re about to take a stumble into bleak video nasty territory. Instead, it is happy merely to function as a lively and extremely skillful slice of visual storytelling, ensuring that, by the time they’ve boarded a train bound for Italy (heading back home for a family Christmas), we already feel as if we know our ostensible protagonists Margaret (Irene Miracle, who later appeared in Argento’s ‘Inferno’) and Lisa (Laura D’Angelo, who didn’t) pretty well.

Likewise, quick cutaways to the exploits of the characters we will subsequently know only as ‘Blackie’ (Flavio Bucci, who surprisingly went on to play Daniel the blind pianist in ‘Suspiria’ just two years later) and ‘Curly’ (Gianfranco De Grassi) – two teenage ne’erdowells who duck onto the train sans tickets to avoid pursuit from the local police – make as feel as if we’ve got their number too.

The two boys are live wire juvenile delinquents with a skeevy, junkie-ish look to them, capable of dumb and violent behaviour (rolling a drunken Santa Claus for small change, stealing an elderly lady’s fur coat), but – crucially – they are definitely not cold-blooded killers at this stage.

As the overcrowded commuter train departs from the station and the characters within it begin to interact, it soon becomes clear that, whatever qualms he may have had about helming a ‘Last House..’ rip-off, Lado definitely brought his A-game to this production. His direction here is extremely confident, drawing convincingly naturalistic performances from the young cast. Gábor Pogány’s photography meanwhile demonstrates a keen eye for stylish framing and visual beauty whilst remaining similarly grounded in naturalism, and the film keeps up a punchy, deliberate editing rhythm that ensures we’re soon deeply engrossed in the travails of our various characters, even though, on the surface of it, nothing terribly interesting has even happened to them yet.

In other words, this is basically just a really well made film, hitting a level of dramatic realism and technical acumen far above the norm for a mid-‘70s Italian genre flick… which of course only serves to make the depredations that eventually engulf our characters all the more difficult to swallow.

Needless to say, things soon get a bit unruly in the corridors of the train, as the two juvies beat up a ticket inspector in full view of a shocked family group, and – rather unexpectedly – their adventures get a bit kinky too, as Blackie corners a slightly older woman wearing a funeral veil in the toilet, and - in a moment of madness upon which the fate of all our characters turns - the nameless woman (played by Macha Méril, best known as the ill-fated psychic in ‘Deep Red’) decides to enthusiastically reciprocate his lewd advances, instigating one of the more uncomfortable (in both senses of the word) bouts of consensual sex that the cinema has to offer.

After this, a spirit of anarchy and misrule is very much abroad on the train, and, as strongly as Lado may assert his disgust at bourgeois hypocrisy elsewhere in the film, it is definitely not a nice spirit. It is no surprise that Margaret and Lisa feel pretty relieved when, as the train sits delayed at the next station, they realise they can shorten their journey by hopping across the tracks to take a different, overnight service back to Italy and, perhaps more importantly, can get away from those scary boys in the process.

It is here, as the two girls negotiate the ill-lit, wood-panelled compartments of the largely empty second train, that Lado flips the switch from the naturalism of the preceding scenes to a foreboding, quasi-expressionistic horror movie approach reminiscent of his earlier ‘Short Night of the Glass Dolls’. And of course, it comes as absolutely no surprise when, after settling down in apparent safety to enjoy the contents of their picnic hamper, the girls hear the by-now familiar sound of Curly’s harmonica echoing through the corridors.

What is more surprising – and represents ‘Night Train Murders’ most interesting deviation from the ‘Last House..’ template – is that the woman in the veil has not only accompanied the two boys onto the new train, but has effectively taken charge of their activities, egging her two new droogs on towards more extreme acts than they would likely have ever committed if left to their own devices, having apparently decided to ditch whatever her prior Christmas plans were in favour of some opportunistic sexual sadism.

Though European genre cinema offers more than its fair share of vamps, dominatrixes, sapphic prison warders and assorted other flavours of female predator, the subtlety with which Méril approaches her role here renders her a uniquely ambiguous and unsettling character. Avoiding any melodramatic over-playing or conventionally ‘monstrous’ gestures, she represents an outwardly anonymous, respectable citizen who can turn on a dime as the weight of suppressed desires and frustrations apparently rush to her head, before assuming the mask of innocent respectability once more as soon as it comes time to face the consequences of the crimes she has instigated.

In thematic terms, Lado seems keen here to explore the notion of the middle-class, adult world holding eventual responsibility for the violence and degradation that the younger generation (and, by implication, the more vulnerable/disenfranchised segments of society as a whole) inflicts upon itself. He expresses this idea pretty bluntly by cross-cutting between the terrifying ordeal the girls are experiencing on the train and a Christmas Eve party held by Lisa’s parents back in Verona – a grim affair in which marital infidelity, alcoholism and fatuous pronouncements about the breakdown of law and order seem to be the order of the day.

Arguably however, the director’s point is better made through Méril’s character, the calm, well-spoken adult who oversees the outrages the young people commit upon each other in the locked train compartment just as surely as state power manipulates Alex and his gang in ‘A Clockwork Orange’ (clearly another key touchstone for the rapeier end of Italio-exploitation in this era).

Inevitably, it is the extended ordeal in the train compartment that forms the dark heart of ‘Night Train Murders’, and Lado and his collaborators build a suitably nightmarish atmosphere for what transpires, as dim bulbs shining through curtained windows project a sickeningly artificial blue/purple light that gives the compartment the theatrical, otherworldly feel of a space in which anything as possible, and in which conventional morality has entirely ceased to apply.

We won’t dwell here on the details of what transpires, but needless to say, it’s all as excruciating as you might fear, with the girls’ mute terror made horrifyingly palpable as they find themselves trapped in a kind of quasi-public S&M ritual from which no safe word will set them free.

To Lado’s credit however, he entirely avoids the titillating gore/slasher approach that many of his peers in Euro-horror might have favoured, instead ensuring that the indignities inflicted upon the victims remain grotesquely, almost pathetically, mundane – more in keeping, one imagines, with the conduct of an actual sexual assault than the stylised spectacle of some misogynistic Argento / Hitchcock fantasia.

When the first death occurs, it is random, unplanned, quick and nasty. With their latent psychopathy brought to the surface by Méril’s manipulation, the boys simply got carried away, and now everyone is in big trouble.

As viewers, we have borne witness to, and to some extent been carried along with, the flow of these terrible events, and, as the bodies of Lisa and Margaret are eventually ejected from the train window like so much human garbage, their belongings and Christmas shopping scattered alongside them on the bleak, nocturnal hillside, you’ll be liable to feel the shadow of some black spider crawling across your soul. It’s horrible, but it is precisely what the filmmakers intended.

After that, there’s nowhere really that ‘Night Train Murders’ can go, artistically speaking. But still, the final act must play out as promised. The killers must intersect with the waiting parents at the station, the truth must be discovered, and empty, soul-withering revenge must, eventually, be meted out. The “WHO ARE THE REAL MONSTERS HERE?” banner must be raised, and a black curtain of full spectrum misanthropy must be drawn down over proceedings.

As Lado simmers things down more to the level of a competently executed exploito-thriller for this final act, it is all dreadfully unpleasant, but regardless – it is the blue-lit horrors of the train compartment that will live on in your memory as Roussos’s absurdly inappropriate ballad returns to plead for peace and understanding over the end credits.

In the end, there’s not much of a helpful message anyone can take home from this atrocity exhibition, beyond perhaps the practical advice gamely offered by whichever foreign distributor came up with the idea of calling it ‘Don’t Ride on Late Night Trains’. Merry Christmas, everybody.

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(1) By way of further clarifying ‘Night Train..’s status as a ‘Last House..’ rip-off, You will of course note the slight similarity of original release Italian title (‘Last Stop..’), and,  rather more shamelessly, that the film was even foisted upon American viewers at various points in time as both ‘Last House: Part 2’ and ‘The New House on the Left’. Hedging its bets genre-wise, the latter release even featured an (admittedly very cool) poster illustration that appears to depict one of the girls on the train being attacked by ‘Blind Dead’-esque hooded zombies!