 Welcome to another episode of Frightfully Forgotten Horror Movies, but before we get started, what are we drinking? Today we're drinking Abynormal. Today we're going to bring to you 1972's Raw Meat, aka Death Line. Yeah. It is directed by Gary Sherman. He also directed Poultry Guys 3, also directed a very, very good horror movie which we covered last year called Dead and Buried. It stars the legend, Donald Pleasants. Also along with him is Norman Rosington. He's been in, again, tons of stuff, just to name one, A Hard Day's Night with the Beatles. The Beatles! The Beatles! And Christopher Lee makes a very brief cameo in this movie. The movie starts off very groovy. We see this sort of English posh gentleman, goes down to the tube station, and he sees this girl waiting there. Come on, come on, how much? I'm not a prostitute! Well, luckily I can afford to find out. She all knees him right in the nuts. And he started hearing all these weird grunting noises and all these weird sounds, right? And it gets closer and closer to him. And you see a look of horror on his face. Patricia and Alex, they get off at that station, right? And when they're walking up the stairs, they see somebody just laying like one of many of our nights. And he even says, on New York, you just step over these guys. He's just a drunk. He's just a drunk. And he keeps saying it over and over. He's just a drunk. Get his name, all his identification and stuff from his wallet. They go up to go get an English Bobby. They go back down to find this guy and he's gone. We get introduced to Donald Pleasant's playing Calhoun and he's the top inspector here. Can we get some tea? Tea? Tea? They're coming to bag now? Yeah. He's all got that dart. No. It comes to his attention that this sort of well-to-do man is missing. They go to his apartment or like his house and he starts like eating all these like sweets of his and drinking all this brandy. All of a sudden there's a noise behind him. They look and it's Christopher Lee and he basically tells him to fuck off. That's his bit part and not so many words fuck off. They go back to the police station where one of the colleagues tells them a little bit of the history of like the tube tunnels. In 1892 there ended up being a cave-in and there was men and women that were buried but the company went bankrupt and they didn't have enough money to dig them out so they essentially just let them fucking die. Like nobody was going to help them? Yeah, like not even townsfolk or anything. Yeah, that's it. So how did they survive? Well, we assume they ate each other. It then cuts to the shot and you just see this dark tunnel and just hear this dripping. You see this severed hand all eaten up and bloody and this is a really long shot and it pans to all these dead bodies and you eventually get to this man hunched over this woman, this pregnant woman now both looked sick. She dies and this man loses his mind. Nick Fleetwood is dying. Nick Fleetwood is dying, you know. He goes berserk. He's going berserk and stuff and eventually makes his way into the tube station. He makes a shovel and puts it right in between this guy's head and he kind of comes out of the darkness. The other two guys get freaked out and take a broom and start beating this poor guy in it and his wounds, he's got all these flesh wounds from scurvy and stuff and pales one guy with a broomstick. Calhoun and his partner, they're kind of hitting a brick wall here with this investigation. Let's get some pints. Yeah, let's get a pint of beer. All right, let's get pissed. Johnny shots, doubles, and legitimately think that he was drunk when they shot this because we all know Donald Pleasant's was a piss tank. The same night, Patricia and Alex are taking the tube home again and she forgets her textbook. He says, oh, hold on, I'll go get her for you. And he goes in, door shuts, the tube takes off, he's like, I'll meet you back home. Dang! He gets taken. Patricia wakes up and she's in this strange layer and this man is on top of her. Dang! That's where we're going to end the plot points. If you want to find out what happens at the end of Raw Meat or Deathline, keep watching the damn movie. One of the best things about this movie, the characters, right? Yeah. Calhoun, Donald Pleasant's character, they flesh him out quite a bit with a lot of subtleties too, like the darts, he's always got that dart that he takes the teabag out with. Throws it in the garbage. And then he's always seen the background on the door of his office, that dartboard, but none of the darts are actually close to the dartboard once his tea doesn't like it in a bag. Exactly. This new fangled teabag. It's a little too much for me. Too much for me being in a bag, holy shit. Patricia, the bleeding heart, and then she's coupled up with Alex, the kind of hardened American who's like, yeah, in New York we just step over these guys. You got that kind of clash of American versus the British actually make the British look a bit more. We're a little bit better because we care for our own and you Americans just step over the poor. The man that they call him. You even feel sorry for him. The first scene you see him in, he is grieving over his dying, what you assume his wife is pregnant wife. What kind of existence is this? He's alone down there and no wonder he's going to go fucking nuts. Like I think anybody would. He obviously has access to the real world now because he can come out into the subway and kill people and take them back to his lair, but he won't go further than that. He's afraid to go any further than what he's comfortable with. He could just wander into society and leave that awful lair that he's got and live in the sunlight, but he can't out of his comfort zone. Exactly. Yeah. It's almost like an urban legend. The subway and like the tube, dark, dank, mysterious, as soon as the train disappears through the tunnel and you see the blackness, what's beyond that? You don't know. You always wonder. Now we know. Do you sympathize with everybody, like even the bad guy, if you can call him the bad guy. The Mc Fleetwood guy. The Mc Fleetwood guy. The Mc Fleetwood cannibal. Those balls, those balls hang in there. See through his eyes is like, man, this is awful. And then like when Patricia wakes up, laying there and he is on top of her and you think, what if I was in that position, I just woke up and there was this drooling madman, who's all deformed on top of me, like, what would be going through my head? It would be complete fear. You put yourself in these people's shoes and that's where the horror from this movie comes from, right? I think what he wants is just another companion. So when he takes Patricia, it's kind of like, stay, yeah, yeah, please stay, but he kind of doesn't know how to relate that to her. He can't communicate. The whole atmosphere of this movie, that whole dark, dreary, claustrophobic atmosphere of a subway tunnel is perfect. And Donald Pleasant, he's always rubbing his nose and his nose is always runny. So you get the sense that like, it's always dreary and cold and damp. Just like the tunnels. Just like the tunnels, yeah. So it's like, they're all living in it, kind of. Even though he's not in the tunnels, he's still kind of in the tunnel. Exactly. And the effects of this movie, spot on, like, when they show the dead bodies kind of sprawled out amongst this layer, they look legitimately dead in that whole long shot. That's one, I think, I think it's one continuous shot. It's impressive. What I'd have liked to have seen, though, is a little more cat and mouse between the cannibal guy, the McFleetwood guy, and the rescue party. And the title, raw meat, is, you know, kind of thinking death line is better because it takes place in the subway, death line. Raw meat kind of makes sense, too, because that's all he has to eat. Because yet, it's raw meat. Yeah. No sunlight, no vegetables. That's why he's all bubbled up. Yes. If you haven't seen raw meat or death line in your life, it's good raw, claustrophobic, dark horror. You have to check it out. Till next time, mind the doors.