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Death Line
Gary Sherman
UK, 1972, 87 minutes; Rank Collection video
Review by David Clark (1996)
Aka Raw Meat, Non Prendente Quel Metro

Not shown often enough on TV (certainly not on terrestrial) though probably available on video (it’s been issued at least twice). Perhaps more to the point for many, the doomy, funny opening theme is now available on a CD single. This is the first time any of the soundtrack has been released.

Death Line is one of the best of the sixties and seventies Brit-horror films. Those frequently featured Christopher Lee (cameoing briefly here) and Donald Pleasance (quite prominent). Death Line is a classic horror story, a kind of reworking of the old ‘Beauty and the Beast’ formula, a precursor of Hellraiser in its Britishness, its narration from the villain’s or, rather, the loser’s point of view, and its depiction of society as the real villain, something it shares with most good horror. There’s nothing wrong with Hellraiser, but there was never anything that original about it save, perhaps, the Cenobites, who were at least new to the big screen. Also, as Guillermo del Toro says (it’s one of his personal favourites too), Death Line belongs, completely, to the real world.

Death Line is memorably set in London’s tube system, in some of the miles of unexplored delvings that exist below London. Generations of cannibals descended from Victorian navvies trapped after a cave-in during the building of Russell Square station have developed their own society. Almost the last surviving near-zombie cannibal (Hugh Armstrong, very good) is kidnapping passengers for the sake of his dying mate, and eventually picks someone whose disappearance provokes serious investigation. Eventually he takes Patricia (Sharon Gurney), and the rest of the film consists largely of a search through the tunnels by Patricia’s boyfriend Alex (David Ladd, just about tolerable) while the detective in charge (Donald Pleasance, very good) makes his way through lying bureaucrats in a search for the creature’s origins; it seems the navvies (a handful of men and women) were known to be trapped and left for dead to save money.

The creature’s basic humanity is offset perfectly by the corpse-filled tunnels. Death Line comes complete with lurching, sardonic opening music that suits it perfectly. Much better than From Dusk Till Dawn.