Death Line aka Raw Meat (1972)

(In French, On Cable TV, June 2022) Repetition is an essential part of movies, especially if they aim at a wide audience – it’s an accepted quirk that everything needs to be repeated two or three times to account for short attention spans, people getting up for the washroom (or, these days, having a look at their phones), wide disparities in cognitive capabilities, and the proverbial common denominator. This usually goes double for horror films – not because they’re more complex, but because there usually isn’t much more to say than “monster bad and kills people” repeated a few times to make sure we get the message and get our money’s worth in gore and death. But even given those accepted parameters, Death Line goes all-out on the repetition thing. Every ten minutes or so, the film’s opening event is brought up again (have you heard about the unconscious man in the stairwell? That unconscious man in the stairwell? Yes, that unconscious man in the stairwell! Isn’t it strange that there should be an unconscious man in the stairwell? What a strange place, a stairwell, for an unconscious man! I know, who could imagine such a thing as a stairwell with an unconscious man? etc.) in what almost becomes a running gag. But the film has more than that – a sombre tale of a police inspector investigating something that ends up being a cannibal tribe hidden underneath the London Underground, the film does have a few stylistic flourishes and odd turns. Donald Pleasance, for once, doesn’t play a mad scientist but a surly hard-working London policeman, and his brief scene with Christopher Lee (as a high-ranking MI5 officer) is a meeting of the greats. There are some nice things here for a 1972 horror film – most notably one long uninterrupted sequence, a good portrayal of the monster, and some unnerving plot elements. Less fortunately, an entire subplot of the film having to do with a young couple (endlessly talking about an unconscious man in a stairwell) takes away some of the film’s energy. Death Line is a bit better than my dismissive comments about repetition may suggest, but it’s hardly a great movie – another script rewrite with fewer young couples and more Christopher Lee could have improved things quite a bit.