Movies - Death Line

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	Movies - Death Line

Death Line, or Raw Meat, is a 1972 British horror film, starring Donald Pleasence as Inspector Calhoun, and directed by the American filmmaker, Gary Sherman . The plot is based around a family that lives underground and is decended from diggers who were trapped in a cave in at the turn of the century. The father of the family goes to the "Museum" London Underground station (based on the British Museum tube station) to pick off people for food. The film was distributed as Raw Meat in the United States.

The movie was directly inspired by the popular legend of Scottish cannibal Sawney Beane - it is the tale of the sole surviving descendant of a group of tunnel-workers trapped by a cave-in in a disused section of the London Underground subway system. When the cannibal kidnaps and kills an important politician, he is hunted by a detective as well as an American student and his English girlfriend who were the last to see the victim in the tube station.

Some aspects of the film have caused it to enjoy a favorable critical reputation over the years. Sherman directs the film with a documentarian's sense of detachment, for example, panning slowly across the cannibal's "larder" filled with human cadavers in various stages of decay; the effect is gory but lacking in the sensationalism common to most low-budget horror productions. The portrayal of Detective Calhoun by the late Donald Pleasence has also been praised for the actor's making a three-dimensional character out of a stereotype, and actor Hugh Armstrong gives the revolting figure of the cannibal some Frankenstein-like pathos (a powerful but ailing giant, the only words he knows are "Mind the doors", overheard from train guards).

There was no legitimate home video release of the film in the United States until September 2003, when it was released on DVD.

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