Death Line AKA Raw Meat (Gary Sherman, 1972)

People are going missing from the Russell Square Station in the London Underground.

It falls to a young couple (David Ladd and Sharon Gurney) and a grizzled police inspector (Donald Pleasance) to solve the mystery, 

This leads them on a trail of clues with roots in the dark history of the Station’s construction - a history that is living, breathing and determined to endure…

I have been looking for this movie for years, and it was worth the delay.

Set in then-contemporary (1972) London, Death Line was ann early credit for writer-director Gary Sherman, who would go on to direct other well-regarded genre films Dead & Buried and VIce Squad. 

Death Line is so clean in terms of its story-telling - some of the characters could be critiqued as a little threadbare, but otherwise it is a tight, taut thriller with a great sense of place in terms of history and its themes. 

In its own way, Death Line is an update on the gothic genre, with the Man and Woman as the literal offspring of London’s industrial past - the last descendant of a tunnel crew buried when a tunnel collapsed early in the twentieth century.

 

It is also a movie about little people caught up in capitalism - the Man is a killer but he is also a victim. His ancestors were left to die after the company was unable to pay to rescue them from the collapsed tunnel.

And the only reason the Man ends up hunted down is because his latest meal is a ‘big shot’ (as Donald Pleasance calls him) with connections in high places.

Donald Pleasance has fun as a working class cop - he is dismissive of the young couple and offers his own closed view of the world. He ends up being a secondary antagonist - he distrusts the youngsters, equating them with lawlessness and hedonism. He is also ineffective.

Part of the horror and tragedy of Death Line is that the Man (Hugh Armstrong) is never treated as a monster. Unlike Alex and Patricia, he is deeply in love with his wife, the Woman (June Turner). 

When we meet the couple, the Woman is heavily pregnant, and immobile some kind of illness. When the Man kills the big wig, and uses his blood to try and feed the Woman, it is both horrifying and pitiable.

And when the Woman passes away in childbirth, the Man’s grief is palatable - and drives him to look for another mate.

It is a testament to the filmmakers and Hugh Armstrong’s performance (he only has one line, “Mind the doors!”) that the Man is portrayed with such empathy and dread.

That moral ambiguity increases the tension for the climax, as Alex descends into the tunnels after the Man kidnaps Patricia. 

Bleak yet empathetic, violent yet deeply intelligent, Death Line is worth a look.