 Thanks for checking out this movie review video. This is for the 1972 release Deathline, which is also known as Raw Meat. Now I'll get into that when I get into the initial information, but yeah, there are two names for this film, and both of those names show up where I watch this, which is through the Shutter streaming service. So when I'm posting this video, it is available on Shutter to watch. Now, spoilers, I'm going to be talking spoilers for this since it is an old film. If you haven't seen it yet and you were thinking about watching it, I would say, if you had a lot of interest in it, go ahead and watch it. I wouldn't necessarily recommend it per se. If I was just in a conversation with people and they're like, what have you seen recently? That's really good. Deathline wouldn't really come up. There are some things I like about the film, but there are some things I really don't. So I'll get into those things. So I'm kind of on the fence whether you should watch it or not. So if you had a strong desire, go ahead and watch it. Then come back and watch this. If not, let's talk about it. So this was directed and written by Gary Sherman, and it was also partially written by Siri Jones, who this is like their only credit on IMDb. But Gary Sherman has actually done Dead and Buried, Vice Squad, and Poltergeist 3, which of those I've only seen Dead and Buried. And Dead and Buried is a good film. It's a fun film. And I actually have a movie review, sorry, movie review for it on this channel. So if you want to know what I thought of Dead and Buried, go ahead and check out my review for that. It's available. And I prefer Dead and Buried to this. I think that Dead and Buried is a big improvement on this film personally. So one of the big cells for actually wanting to watch this film is that Donald Pleasance is in it. It's a young Donald Pleasance. This is many years before his role as Dr. Loomis in Halloween, and he's a joy. He's just a joy to see on the screen. He kind of chews the scenery. He really immerses himself in his character. And he's the best part of the film. Just anytime he's in a scene, he's a lot of fun to watch. So they ended up getting Christopher Lee for this film as well, which he's like barely in it. But apparently they were able to get him for scale just because he wanted to work with Donald Pleasance, which I thought was kind of a cool story because it's kind of showing this thing where like Christopher Lee is a big name anyway. And he really loves Donald Pleasance much like all us horror fans who are like Donald Pleasance, amazing. So the film was actually released as Deathline in the UK, which is where it was shot and originally came out. But when it was released in the United States, it was called Raw Meat, and it was edited so that it wouldn't get an X rating. Now, it seems a little weird to me that you would edit it down so it doesn't get a higher rating, but then change the name to something like Raw Meat, which indicates that it should have a harsher rating versus just leaving it as Deathline. I guess that just has to do with what they thought audiences in America would be more interested in. And it's kind of misleading because Raw Meat obviously is kind of playing to the whole cannibalistic aspect of the film, but it's not that strong in the film. Like it's kind of it's shown early and then they kind of get away from it and they're focusing on other things. Like yes, the idea of it is kind of always there. Like oh, he's killing these people. He's probably going to eat them later. And you know, you see some of the bodies sitting around here and there, but it's not a focus of the film. So for them to just change it to Raw Meat, it's a little misleading because that's not really what it's about. It just happens to be a part of the story. So Hugh Armstrong was the guy who played, it's just known as the man. You know, I call him Tunnel Guy. So I'm just going to call him Tunnel Guy from now on. The guy living in the subway tunnel who is the cannibal and has all these lesions and disgusting stuff on his face and drools a lot. That's another thing. He drools uncontrollably a lot of times, which is like, what's the point of that? It's a little weird, but whatever. It's kind of funny. I laughed at it. But Hugh Armstrong plays Tunnel Guy and that role, get this, that role was going to be for Marlon Brando. When I read that I was like, wait, wait, what, okay? And then I was watching the film and I'm like, Marlon Brando was going to play this role. No, I'm glad that it was Hugh Armstrong because Marlon Brando, I think would have, well, am I glad? Because Marlon Brando would have made it more ridiculous, but then it may have been more fun. So actually now that I'm thinking about it, I'm a little bummed that we didn't get Marlon Brando. He ended up having to pull out because his son got pneumonia. And I think his son ended up dying from that bout of pneumonia actually. So pretty terrible. But that's why he didn't get Marlon Brando, wish he was in it. Sherman, when he had to do the shooting, there's a scene or a series of scenes with Donald Pleasants and Christopher Lee in it together. And he chose to shoot them separately, never in the same frame because the height difference. Donald Pleasants is way shorter than Christopher Lee and he felt like if he tried to frame a shot with the two guys in it, it would just look too weird. He'd have to get too far back and you'd see like this giant height gap. So I knew this going into watching the film. So I don't know if it's just because I was already cognizant of this or not. But when it got to that scene, it really bothered me how it was just like, it's like they were standing on like the furthest away portions of the room as they could. It's like Donald Pleasants on this side, Christopher Lee on this side, back to Donald Pleasants, back to Christopher Lee. It was annoying and weird and I felt like it just didn't work. I feel like at the least they should have just changed the scene so that they sat down together or something because they're in like a living room area. So they could have sat on the couch or I don't know, you know, have Christopher Lee sit on the floor. Donald Pleasants will sit on a couch. Maybe that'll take care of it. But it was just weird. It played very odd. And to be honest, you didn't even need Christopher Lee's character in the film. I mean, I understand it's cool because it's Christopher Lee and you'd be like, look at this big name, but he's barely in it. The character means pretty much nothing in the context of the film. And it was just kind of like this moment of, I didn't really get it. So anyway, the 2011 DVD that was released for this, oh, I forgot to write down who actually who released it. But it was in a box set. This is the cool thing. The 2011 release was in a box set of pumpkin head, dolls, scarecrows. Sometimes they come back and this 1978 invasion of the body snatchers. That's cool box set right there. I would buy that box set. I mean, maybe I can buy that box set. That might be available. I might be able to buy that box set. We'll find out. So the intro music for this makes it sound kind of like 70s action cop type deal. I feel like the music kind of mismatches in the beginning of what the film actually is. And it's just weird. It's kind of like upbeat and funky and weird. And you're just like, what type of movie am I watching? I thought this was like a horror film. And it is. It is a horror film. So the music in the intro is just totally mismatch, which is really, really weird. So I made an observation while I was watching this and I was like, oh, in the intro, it's with a man for it, you know, walking around, going into like these strip clubs and stuff, and they're showing all these pictures of like live nudes and all that. So I was like, oh, the raw meat in this, at least in the intro is the strippers. You know, they're the raw meat for these horny men to look at. So there you go. I still don't know why do we. After watching the movie, I still don't get it why Manfred was there. Like that's one of the big questions throughout is like, why was Manfred even there in the first place? I mean, I guess just because he wanted to see some boobs. So it seems like. So the shots in the subway actually look really good in this film. The way they're framed, the way it just looks and the lighting of it. I don't know if they had to alter the lighting at all or not, but the lighting of it makes it look great and where they chose to kind of set up the shots. So like one of my favorite things other than Donald Pleasants in this film is the subway. All the subway shots look really good. The ambiance is great. The sets are really cool looking. But you know, those two things, you know, the subway and Donald Pleasants are pretty much it for me for this film. So it kind of appears in the beginning that they're trying to make this kind of point of like rude American versus polite English person. And, you know, that's been done in film a lot of times. And you see this because Alex and Patricia are kind of coming off the subway. They see Manfred, who's like face down on the stairs and his immediate response being from, you know, he's being from America. I don't know if he's from New York, but he talks about New York a lot. But being from America is just like, oh, in New York, we just, you know, we'd leave it. He's probably drunk. But Patricia being of English sensibility is like, oh, no, he could be hurt. We could help him. She literally throws out, he could be a diabetic. And it's just like, okay, like, why is that your first thought? It's kind of weird. So yeah, I just kind of viewed that as them trying to draw this contrast immediately of rude American versus very nice English woman. And, you know, she really wants to help him because she's very focused on, you know, being nice. And that's kind of more of like a UK societal thing versus the perception of the American societal thing where it's, you know, typical New Yorker. I don't care about you. I mean, for me, if I see something going on, that's not my life. That's not anything I should be concerned of. I'm moving on and I'm doing what I'm doing. And to a degree, you know, that's kind of true, to be honest. It kind of is. So, okay. So the amount of time that they actually spend on Patricia perseverating on what happened with the guy, because as we all know, if, you know, if you're watching this far, you probably watched the movie, you know, Manfred disappears. And she was so concerned about helping him, even after everything's done with it, like he's over it pretty much immediately. And she keeps thinking about it. Now, the fact that they give so much screen time to her, just like perseverating on it and continually thinking about it. It gives you the clue that there's something worse happening, that something terrible happened to Manfred. And then you eventually see that terrible thing that happened to Manfred. And it shows that like his hands all like chewed up, obviously he's being cannibalized. And this is probably one of the great points of the film, where they first unveil that Manfred's been partially eaten. And then they show a bunch of other bodies that are in different stages of being like flayed and eaten. And the practical effects for this look really good. So those were really gross, really creepy. I think they did an excellent job executing that made for a really nice scene and they were kind of like panning slowly over. There's a lot of panning in this film, but that's one of the moments where the panning works extremely well, where they're kind of showing the whole, you know, layout of tunnel guys set up in the subway. So, I like how Inspector Halkoon is such a massive prick, especially when he's dealing with Alex. They bring him in to like ask him questions and he's just like on the offensive immediately and just treating him like he did it. He killed this guy. He did something to him and dragged his body somewhere and it's just, it's over the top, but it makes it kind of funny. So I kind of enjoyed that. The reveal of, oh yeah, I already talked about this. I had just written that the reveal of that bend up hand looked really gnarly and then you see all the bodies and I was like, wow. Yeah, that was my reaction to it. Wow. The constant dripping water sound in the tunnels is annoying. You can do a little bit of that, but I feel like they let it go on way too long, at least in the beginning of the film. And I will say it's kind of funny that I'm recording right now because it's raining outside and right back in there, it's like my HVAC room, so my sump pump is back there so you can hear water dripping into the basin in the sump pump. So it was funny as I was sitting down and getting my setup ready for recording. I just hear this consistent drip and I was like, very appropriate for reviewing Deathline because there's a lot of that in Deathline and it's over the top. I can't decide if I like the long slow moving shots in the tunnel or not. Now, I say that because it looks cool, but at the same time, I feel like they let it go on just too long. It feels like those types of scenes, they should have cut down a bunch, so that's why I feel conflicted on it. That dude looks pretty nasty because he's got a ton of facial sores, tunnel guy. Tunnel guy looks really gross when you finally see a little bit of light on his face. What are those sores from? Is it just from hard living or is it insinuated that that's kind of what happens to you when you're a cannibal? That's what eating human meat does. You kind of get the idea that he's eating raw human meat because I don't see any setups for cooking it. Just saying. I think he's eating raw human meat. It's like human sashimi to a degree. Watching this film just makes me think of Chud. Granted, Chud was done after Deathline. I don't know if there was any inspiration drawn from Deathline for Chud, but it just keeps making me think of Chud, like how much time they actually spend adventuring into the subway tunnels, or in that case, just into the sewers. Fun times. I like Chud more than this. I will say that much. It seems they're giving the idea that the man in the tunnel is basically devolved into almost a caveman-like status. He doesn't speak anymore and he seems to act ape-like. He especially acts ape-like. I was referring mainly to the part where I guess it's his companion, his wife, dies, and he's going out and he just starts swinging things around and he's raging out basically because he's grieving. That shows how devolved he is as a human. He's a very caveman. He can't even deal with those emotions in any other way than yelling and breaking things, which shows that he's not sophisticated, he's not civilized anymore. He's devolved to be a caveman. The part where he kills those two people in the subway with the broom, and he shoves that broomstick right through the dude, that looked way too effortless to me. It went through like a hot knife through butter, it was just like zoop. I was like, that's a little much. They do reference it later when they're doing the autopsy on the guy and they're like, this guy has incredible strength. It just went right through. I assume they're doing to up the stakes of you feeling tense when Pleasants and Alex have to actually face off with the guy because you're like, oh my gosh, he has super caveman strength. They don't stand a chance. So I think that's why they did it a little much. And then they have like in the tougher parts, this like, or the more violent parts, this crappy electronic mess of music. It just sounds awful. It's just like you're just like terrible music choice. There are a lot of bad musical choices in this film, I will say. So they go back to Alex and Patricia a few times in this film, and it feels very disconnected from it because they find Manfred. So like the story starts with Alex and Patricia finding Manfred, but then it feels like they're spending so much time with Calhoun, Pleasants' character, and kind of following that. And then they'll check back on Patricia and Alex like periodically, and it feels disconnected. It feels like they don't have anything to do with the story anymore. I mean, obviously eventually they do, but I feel like they needed to write it differently so that they actually stayed more tied into the actual story because it just feels weird and out of place and like so what when they keep going back to them because they don't get like re-involved into it until probably about like that hour mark, and this film's only like an hour and 25 minutes or something. So it's just, I don't know, it's just a weird thing. And that leads me to the pacing of this. It's a very slow and meandering film, which at times is good when you really want to look at the scenery like in the tunnel, but it just always feels like it goes on at least a little bit too long. And yeah, there's just not a whole lot going on. And for what the subject matter is, there should have been a lot more going on. They should have kind of kept the tension up and they just don't do that. It gets pretty boring to be honest. And the yelling and screaming in this film is excessive from Patricia and from Tunnel Guy, and it blows out the audios. It sounds terrible. I don't know as a director why you would allow people to yell like that. I mean, you can do it, but like for sustained periods, they have like minutes of just yelling going on. And it's just like, this is annoying. This is not fun to watch. This is, I get the point. We can move on. Let's stop now. It's like, ugh. There are some scenes where the Tunnel Guy is profusely drooling. I talked about this a little bit earlier, but yeah, just like, I'm talking like amazing amounts of drool just like falling right out of his mouth. I don't know if they did that because it's like he's supposed to be in like this violent trance or something. And they felt like that would be a good way to emphasize it, but it's just, it's weird, but I laughed at it. So like that's something that was just kind of like, okay, this is funny. So I wrote what actually did happen to Manfred. Like we know that he ends up getting chewed up and everything and eventually, you know, Tunnel Guy took him, but he was laying on the stairs and then he disappears, which leads me to believe he had some sort of issue happen or Tunnel Guy came out, knocked him out, saw Alex and Patricia coming and then ran away and then waited for them to leave and then like drug his body. But there was like no blood. Like they couldn't tell that anything had actually been done to him. So it kind of seemed more like he had some sort of like, I don't know, he had a stroke, he had a heart attack or, you know, and he just fell down and then like Tunnel Guy, after Patricia and Alex left, Tunnel Guy just found him and was just like, oh sweet, fresh meat, let's take this back and play it up, let's eat. So I don't know, it just made me wonder, like they didn't touch on what actually happened to him, like all the events. It's kind of interesting when Tunnel Guy's trying to make Patricia his new companion. Like when he first abducts her, you're kind of like, oh my gosh, is he going to kill her, is he going to eat her? And then you realize he's actually trying to have her fill the place of his previous companion who he was so broken up about. Because I mean, let's be honest, you're a caveman like dude living in a subway. Don't you want to have like at least one friend or at least one companion, someone to spend the time with, to commiserate with, whatever. So it leads to some interesting moments where, once again, there's like excessive yelling going on during these moments, but if they would have scaled that back, you could have gotten to more of these moments where you almost feel a little bit bad for Tunnel Guy because that's all he knows. Like he's societally devolved, he doesn't know how to interact with people. Yes, he's eating people, but that's like all he knows at this point as far as we know as audience members. And he's just trying to, at that point with Patricia, be nice and you see these gestures and these moments of him like trying to talk, like that's another thing. Like he's trying to be like her at that point and relate to her to try to calm her down and be like, I don't want to hurt you or anything, but he can't do that because there's that language barrier like he doesn't really talk, but he's trying very hard to do that. So there are these kind of moments where you almost feel bad for him, but then you're also like, yeah, but he's also killing and eating people. So, but that's a good thing. Like, and they should have played up more those kind of sweeter, more interesting, more, you know, heartfelt moments. And I think by taking away a bunch of the yelling and screaming, they could have helped with that. Just saying. Yeah, so in summation with this film, a few thoughts. Donald Pleasance is outstanding. I mean, if you just want to see a really good performance, I would recommend this film to people. It's it's fun. The underground sets are awesome. Like I said, those are a lot of fun to look at. So people just want to see that cool. And this kind of gets to one of those things that it happens in some other films, especially horror where it's like, do you really know what's lurking beneath your city? I mean, there are sewer systems, there are tunnels, there are subways, all that stuff. Like, do you really know what or who is down there? I'm talking even from like, you know, small things like the raccoons and rats and stuff like that. Like in my neighborhood, we had an issue where, you know, raccoons were just jumping up from the, from the water drainage grates and going through people's trash. Like you don't expect that to happen, but once you see it happen or you hear about it happening, you're like, oh yeah, there are things that live there. So this film kind of plays on the fears of do you really know what's going on in your city? Do you really know what's underneath you at any time and shouldn't that scare you a little bit? It's kind of the point. So I kind of like that aspect of it. Now, there are a lot of problems with this film. Like I said, like story-wise, there are some things they probably should have fixed. Like keeping Alex and Patricia tied more into it. It was very slow in me entering all the yelling. The music was terrible. The dripping, you know, all that stuff. So with my five star rating with half stars in play, I'm going to give it two. I'm going to give it a two star rating. A little bit over under half the halfway mark. It's not terrible, but it's not very good either. So yeah, that's just kind of my feeling on it. But I would like to hear from you. Put some comments down there. If you've seen Deathline, AKA Raw Meat, did you like it? What are your thoughts? Wasn't Donald Pleasant's really cool? And were the tunnel scenes kind of interesting? Verify. And then hit that subscribe for me if you can. If you're not already a subscriber. The majority of people who watch my videos are not subscribers. So if you could pay me back with a quick subscribe, I'd appreciate that. If you are already a subscriber, hit the like button just to let me know you're still there to encourage me. I love it. And then obviously comments. So thank you everyone for checking this out. And until next time, keep it brutal.