Going Underground: Why Deathline (aka Raw Meat) is my Jam

 

Movies that I call “tunnel horror” are solidly in my wheelhouse.  You set a horror film in an abandoned subterranean train station, a metropolitan subway line, underground city, or even a short traffic tunnel, and odds are I’ll enjoy it. There’s something about the claustrophobia, the perpetual darkness, the horror of buried secrets and things that cannot dwell in the sunlight that gets under my skin. And if you take such a film and add iconic horror stars Donald Pleasance and Christopher Lee into the mix, you have the makings of a classic.

 Released in the U.S. as Raw Meat with some of the gore excised to avoid an X rating, Deathline is a cult classic that touches heavily on history and class in London in the early 70s. The four minute opening title sequence featuring a bizarre Will Malone electronic jazz/blues score emphasizes the sleaze from the get-go.  It’s music that announces that the glamourous swinging 60s have come to a crashing end and all we’re left with is cheap porn where the actors have b/o, bad teeth, and leave their socks on. I mean that as a compliment by the way, as the soundtrack couldn’t be better for this film.

 

The drawn-out opening follows a bowler-hatted man-about-town as he struts arrogantly from peep-show to peep-show on a personal tour of the London sexual underbelly only to find a gruesome end in the Underground. As it turns out, this particular sex-craved gentleman was an OBE (Order of the British Empire) which pits MI5 against the local police as his disappearance becomes a most inconvenient state secret thanks to the intervention of two university students who stumble across the body. Donald Pleasance gives one of his great oddball performances as the harried, bitchy police inspector who cares little for the ministrations of Christopher Lee’s ominous, arrogant MI5 chief. 

As it turns out, the killer knows nothing of politics or anything else relevant to the times, as he is a surviving descendent of a 19^th century tunneling group who died (or so people assumed) in a tunnel collapse while building the London Underground. In true capitalist spirit, the construction company decided it was more cost effective to simply leave the bodies buried in the rubble than excavate them and cause an even bigger scandal.  An unwise choice indeed, as it seems this chap has been knocking off those subway passengers unlucky enough to take the subway late at night and devouring them with his wife or sister/wife or whatever unseemly relation she may be. The long, deeply unnerving tracking shot of their underground lair/crypt/abattoir is as lurid and grimy as anything in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which was released two years later. Hugh Armstrong’s portrayal of the gangly, disease-ridden killer is both thoroughly revolting and oddly emotional. It’s one of the film’s strongest elements.

Despite the killer’s total lack of political motivation, the tensions between the working class, the petite bourgeoise, and the London upper-crust provide the driving force of the narrative. Cannibalism and capitalism make for strange bedfellows indeed. Deathline is what I imagine would have happened if early-70s Wes Craven had read E.P. Thompson’s The Making of The English Working Class and decided to make a horror film. And it’s fitting that this was in fact directed by an American living in London (Gary Sherman, who would go on in the next decade to direct the classic Dead and Buried). Sherman saturates the film with corruption, apathy, and a sleazy grime that is hard to wash off once the film is over. Yet the witty screenplay and political deep structure turn this film into something special. It’s sleaze, but “cultured sleaze” (a phrase I’ve never used before and am not fully sure what it means, but when you watch the film, you’ll get it).