Night Train to Venice

And I don't think I am exaggerating. Everything is terribly wrong in this picture: from the absolute lack of story (from minute 20 there is nothing to understand) to the amateur performances or cinematography. A complete failure.

I think my life can be divided in two parts, before watching "A Night Train To Venice" and after. I used to be an indecisive and hesitant man, a weak-willed and irresolute person. Then came the two hours that changed it all. I was pushed to my limit, tested the boundaries of my spiritual and even physical powers, the very capacity of human strength! And I made it, I actually managed to see THE WHOLE freaking thing, from start to finish, from first to last carriage. And surprisingly I lived. Now I am the most confident, positive tenacious and tough man... in the local madhouse. The things movies can do for you...!

P.S. Anyway, if you're preparing your dissertation on the refraction of artificial light through the windows of a night train, you may actually find the movie quite useful.

everybody likes to watch bad movies from time to time, simply because they're so bad it's funny. well, this is not one of those movies. no matter how well developed your sense of irony might be, this movie is so insultingly bad that I doubt anybody could derive any pleasure from watching it.

one of the biggest complaints my friends and I had was that it feels like it was written by 3 separate people on 3 different continents, without any knowledge of what the others were doing. for some reason, hugh grant takes a train to venice (imagine that!) and on the trip he meets this woman and has gibberish conversations with her. malcolm mcdowell comes around and says some needlessly cryptic things and a guy gets tossed off the train. then there's the nazis who aren't so much characters as really bad caricatures played by people with no talent.

oh yeah...there's a naked man in a cage at one point, as well as some american nazis holding a rally and beating guys up in the street, though they're in Europe...

once hugh gets to venice, all hell breaks loose...well, not really. the movie just doesn't make any sense from this point on. it's like a bad fever dream. i won't even try to explain because there's no point.

granted, a movie doesn't have to be linear or have a coherent plot to be a good movie...look at david lynch. however, this is not a david lynch film. it's just bad. there is no story, plot, coherence, there are no real characters, and really no point. i'm angry that i watched this and now hate everybody associated with its production.

What a mess. I bought the laserdisc of this years ago, an impulse purchase, because of Hugh Grant. Up to that point I had enjoyed everything I'd seen him in. After suffering through watching the film, all I could think was that the writer(s) and director must have been doing vastly different types of drugs resulting in an incomprehensible train wreck (pun intended) of a film. Neither Grant's charm nor McDowell's depth and style can save this one. The re-titling of the film to "Train to Hell" is probably the best thing the distributors have done. At least they're being honest that this is a train ride to hell in a handbasket. I haven't bothered to watch the film since (just can't bring myself to torture myself that way again).

If you like experimental films then you might get a modicum of enjoyment out of the non-linear story line, interleaved editing, and Kenneth Anger-style fantasy imagery, but to the rest of us it is a jumbled mess. As the film progresses, many cards are laid on the table, but not a one of them is played. The dialog is embarrassingly bad, and the meager plot meanders in a few different directions, but doesn't develop any of them. It wasn't even bad enough to laugh at. The ending came close to being laughable, but when I realized that this was in fact the end I was furious at having wasted so much time. The ONLY redeeming quality of the film was the images of Venice during Carnival. That was quite haunting and beautiful, but not nearly worth the boredom and frustration one must endure in the vain attempt to make sense out of this cluttered mishmash.