I HEART REPLACEMENT BUS SERVICES: Death Line (1972)

There are all kinds of marriages and all kinds of families. We’re used to seeing depictions of recrimination and hate between ‘normal’ families (whatever the fuck they are) – but love between members of flesh-feasting families? Hmm. Gary Sherman's Death Line (AKA Raw Meat), a truly brilliant and gritty British horror film of the 1970s as there ever was, is the missing link between tenderness and brutality, between affection and entrails.

Alex and Patricia: Hairy Moments

In 1892, during the construction of a new tunnel between Holborn and Russell Square tube stations, there was, we’re told, a cave-in, trapping both female and male workers underground. Cannibalism was the logical conclusion for these unfortunate souls and over the decades, successive generations of Vitamin D-deficient, scurvy-ridden cannibals have survived and thrived, forging their own subterranean life and establishing their own rites and rituals, including a ‘cemetery’ where generations of dead cannibals are laid out with keepsakes taken from their snatched victims: strings of pearls, brooches, wallets etc. 

Into the depths

By 1972, their population has dwindled to one couple. When the female half finally dies, the ‘husband’ is left alone to surmount to the salty mountain of churned earth that hides their lair and emerge into the upper depths, as it were, to continue the family tradition of abducting passengers from Russell Square tube platform for sustenance.

No more port & prozzies for YOU!

Death Line has very little in common with the other horror films flickering into the fleapits of Britain in 1972. Essentially, it lacks three particular things and is all the better for it: that gift of failed seriousness (probably the best working definition of camp there is), gaudiness of design and embarrassing, dated references to the Permissive Society. All are notable for their absence. The latter one is particularly worth noting, as few genres date worse than horror. Though the film is grotesque and nihilistic in heavy measure, it is low-key and blackly comic where it matters, and as a result, leaves the majority of early seventies Brit horrors in the dust.

Warts and all

The pathos of the cannibal’s plight is brought home early in the film via a one-take, snail’s-pace, tracking shot round the dank, fetid underground lair he inhabits: rats, blood, gore, ragged limbs, maggots and hanging from rusty hooks, rotting human carcasses with inky, infinite hollows where their eyes once were, teeth protruding and exposed, lips torn off. Accompanied by the sound of a thumping electronic heartbeat and water dripping on bone-chillingly cold, stony floors, this scene does not build pressure or suspense, but rather keeps you in a prolonged and conscious state of fear.

Raw deal

The sobbing, keening and wailing is finally revealed to be the cannibal, bent over his (pregnant!) ‘wife’ as she breathes her last. When we see his warty, palsied and diseased hand gently clasp hers, this couple look like some hideous, plague-ridden version of Rodolfo and Mimi. As the shot tracks away through the seemingly endless tunnels, the Cannibal’s sobs echo through. It’s unbearably poignant.

Love is love is love

It’s an odd feeling that this film generates, sympathy for the ‘monster’: “Oh, the poor cannibal! Snatching a Tory MP from a tube platform and feeding the pink flesh and port-laced blood to his beloved, dying, semi-corpse of a companion!” But there you go. Eliciting sympathy for the monstrous is no mean feat, especially when you’ve witnessed his various quick-as-flame forays into ultra-violence, like impaling one LU maintenance worker with a broom handle and burying a shovel in the head of another.

Doug

When he snatches sensitive, shag-haired student Patricia (Sharon Gurney), she is spared on account of the fact she reminds him of his wife as she lies whimpering and gasping on the same makeshift bed as he raises a blunt weapon above her. He waivers, and after a scuffle, Patricia beats a retreat and when he finally finds her huddled against the mildewed bricks of a pitch-black corner, he tries to appeal to her by repeating over and over, barely intelligible: ‘Mind the doors! Mind the doors! Mind the doors? Mind. The. Doors!” Probably the only three words he’s ever heard during his beleaguered existence. 

He’s like someone born after the Bomb, growing up in a sunless world where there is no radio, TV, cinema, music or written word. Only the most basic modes of communication have ever been necessary to him and the platform guard’s mantra is implanted so deeply in his consciousness it must be like a node on his brain. Shortly after, when Patricia’s chilly and humourless boyfriend, Alex (David Ladd – son of Alan, no less) finds her, he becomes the villain, stomping on the head of the feeble cannibal as though it were a rancid melon.

Struggle to the death: Pat and 'the man'

As the man presiding over the strange case of all these disappearances, Donald Pleasance gives the oddest and most memorable performance of his career as Inspector Calhoun. When he’s not fighting with anglepoise lamps and being dry, loquacious and sarcastic, he’s on an endless quest for tea, often served up to him by a stoic and weary WPC (he also barks at her to fetch his pools coupons at one point).

He’s ably assisted by Norman Rossington’s Detective Sergeant Rogers, an unflappable and cultured straight man to Calhoun’s goofball. Christopher Lee has a very brief cameo as a supercilious MI5 operative called Strauss-Villiers (“Oh I know him,” says Calhoun, “Big shit . . . sorry, shot, down the MOD”) who wants the disappearance of the kerb-crawling MP covered up.

Dry as a vat of Martinis: Inspector Calhoun on the blower

Bleak and nihilistic Death Line may be, but it’s leavened with a surfeit of clever humour. The instances of Grand Guignol-style aggression seem like touches of ironic black comedy after we’ve heard Alex asking Patricia if she wants to see The French Connection and she replies with a shudder: “Oh, no! Too violent.” Probably not too violent for a dead-hearted, self-interested Statesider like Alex who charmingly responds to Patricia’s concern over the slumped MP by shrugging, “We’d just walk over people like this in New York!”

One man's pleasure

The score by Wil Malone, latterly a heavy metal producer, jumps between spiralling Hammond organ notes and those mad, trilling, weighty pre-80s synths, a sound predating, but now automatically associated with, John Carpenter’s scores. The opening sequence sets this sonic hopscotch against the seedy neon glow of Soho (as was) and its various clip joints (“Exciting! Erotic!”). But the sound that remains in the head long after the credits roll is the death cry of the cannibal. It’s the end of the film, the cannibal’s existence (you couldn't call it a life) and the family line.

The light at the very, very, very end of the tunnel...