Blue Underground: Raw Meat (Death Line)(1972) - Reviewed

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Images courtesy of Blue Underground

Years before producer Alan Ladd Jr. won the Academy Award for Best Picture for producing Mel Gibson’s Braveheart and even further before founding The Ladd Company which produced such genre classics as Chariots of Fire, Alien and The Empire Strikes Back, he started out working within the thriller/horror subgenre.  Starting out with future Dead & Buried director Gary Sherman in his 1972 debut film Death Line (retitled Raw Meat and recut for North American audiences), the British horror film co-written by Sherman and Ceri Jones is an exploitation flick centered around a murder spree arising from within the London subways featuring the talents of Donald Pleasence, a sneaky cameo by Christopher Lee, A Hard Days Night actor Norman Rossington and half-brother David Ladd as the film’s hero and How to Get Ahead in Advertising star Hugh Armstrong as a deformed inbred mutant wreaking havoc and horror on the subterranean tunnels of England. 
 
Scotland Yard’s Inspector Calhoun (Donald Pleasence doing an intoxicated skeptical dress rehearsal for Dr. Loomis in Halloween) is on the hunt for a killer that is prowling the London subways and recently claimed the life of a prominent politician, a figure a young couple Alex (David Ladd) and Tricia (Sharon Gurney) bump into and call the police for only to return and find his body missing.  As the investigation bores on, it becomes apparent the attacker is the descendent of an entire populace of 19th century tunnel workers who were caved in and left for dead but survived decades of cannibalizing the flesh of the dead and in-breeding.  Each night in the tunnel, a mysterious inhuman howling ‘Mind the Doors’ echoes throughout the subway.  Just who or what is lurking within the Death Line looking around for Raw Meat to dine in on and/or a potential new mate to kidnap and sire with a new generation of inbred offspring.

 
Featuring scenes of Donald Pleasence and Norman Rossington really getting smashed at a bar, scenes shot at the incomplete London Underground station “Museum”, a moody, unsettling and occasionally funky electronic score coauthored by Will Malone and Jeremy Rose and effective, economical cinematography by Kenneth Branagh’s 70mm Hamlet cinematographer Alex Thomson, Death Line (recut for American markets and retitled Raw Meat) though never really ballooning into a full throated scream still points to American director Gary Sherman’s debut as a solid one.  


The Beatles fans will notice Norman Rossington immediately as Donald Pleasence’s police partner and Christopher Lee’s unlikely cameo mid-movie (unfortunately just one scene) fosters notions of a crossover as Lee would appear on the album cover for Paul McCartney’s Band on the Run.  Ken Russell’s Women in Love actress Sharon Gurney as the hippie scream queen who genuinely tries to help find the missing politician but winds up disappearing herself is good and no stranger to horror herself having done Crucible of Horror with Michael Gough.  The one who perhaps gives the best performance across the board is the monster itself played by Hugh Armstrong who somehow manages with his disfigurement and inability to speak more than three words to evoke equal amounts of terror and sympathy.

 
Between 2017 and 2018, US based boutique label Blue Underground commandeered by Maniac filmmaker Bill Lustig released a two-disc special edition scanned in 2K alongside now defunct British label Network’s disc release of the same replete with a collectible booklet.  Since then, Blue Underground in their newfound mission to update each and every single Blu-ray disc release into 4K UHD replete with quite frankly silly and overblown Dolby Atmos audio bumps and Death Line was no exception.  Given a new 16-bit 4K scan from the original uncensored camera negative with Dolby Atmos, DTS-HD 5.1 or original uncompressed mono sound, Blue Underground have given one of their favorite titles a major lift and it comes housed with a second blu-ray disc full of extras including interviews with the cast and crew, Gary Sherman and Hugh Armstrong, Alan Ladd Jr. and Jay Kanter.  


If you already own the previous Blue Underground disc or the Network disc, the new 4K UHD represents a substantial upgrade but also doesn’t necessarily merit Atmos audio rendering but it sounded nice for what its worth.  Mostly though, curios will want to watch it as a double-bill to Wake in Fright in terms of trying to gauge which film Donald Pleasence was more intoxicated on.

--Andrew Kotwicki