Decay As Atmosphere, Grief As Motive

Read Time:5 Minute, 47 Second

MOVIE REVIEW
Raw Meat (aka Death Line) [4K UHD + Blu-ray]
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Genre: Horror, Thriller
Year Released: 1972, Blue Underground 4K 2025
Runtime: 1h 27m
Director(s): Gary Sherman
Writer(s): Gary Sherman, Ceri Jones
Cast: Donald Pleasence, Norman Rossington, David Ladd, Sharon Gurney, Hugh Armstrong, Christopher Lee
Where to Watch: available September 30, 2025, pre-order your copy here: www.mvdshop.com or www.amazon.com

RAVING REVIEW: RAW MEAT sits at the intersection of urban legend and social rot, a lean, grimy British horror that uses the London Underground like a haunted cathedral. A nineteenth-century cave-in strands a work crew beneath the city; generations later, the last survivor surfaces, broken by isolation and driven by a wretched kind of need. That core idea—civilization gliding on rails while something else festers below—gives the film its staying power.

Gary Sherman directs with a patience that can read as courageous today. Instead of sprinting from scare to scare, he lets the tunnels breathe. The camera lingers on concrete and condensation; it prowls through subterranean rooms, evoking the stasis of a life lived without daylight. That attention to place builds a mood no jump scare can buy. RAW MEAT’s terror is less about shocks than the slow realization that the world beneath the platforms has a routine all its own, governed by hunger and ritual.

At ground level, the film plays out as a police procedural, anchored by Donald Pleasence’s Inspector Calhoun, a cynical pub crawler who’s equal parts funny and ferocious. Pleasence doesn’t treat Calhoun like a noble crusader; he lets him be irritable, small, and occasionally petty, which oddly makes the character more believable and more watchable. The procedural threads aren’t complicated—missing persons, contradictory statements, jurisdictional pride—but Pleasence gives them flavor. He also becomes the film’s balance, keeping the surface alive while the underground sequences sink into despair.

What separates this from a hundred other rough-and-ready shockers of its era is the empathy it extends to its so-called monster. Hugh Armstrong’s subterranean man is not a one-note boogeyman; he’s a product of abandonment and repetition, communicating with a hoarse refrain that becomes a plea. The film is bold enough to pause for grief: a scene of mourning in that lair that should feel off, but instead lands with a weird tenderness. The emotion doesn’t defang the horror—the attacks still land—but it complicates the revulsion. In the end, RAW MEAT is as much a tragedy about a lineage starved of sunlight as it is a cannibal thriller.

The London Underground setting is a gift that Sherman and his team unwrap with care. Stations and service corridors look lived-in rather than staged. Lighting is sparse and practical, allowing darkness to fill the frame. You can smell the mildew and dirt. That texture grounds the more sensational elements and keeps the film from drifting into comic-book territory. When violence arrives, it hits hard because the world around it is so ordinary. A shovel becomes a guillotine not because of elaborate effects but because the spaces feel hostile to soft bodies.

From a modern vantage, this new restoration is vital. RAW MEAT’s power lives in gradients of black, brick texture, and the shine of moisture on stone; flatten those, and you lose half the movie. Presented with care, the palette reveals detail in the tunnels, and the soundscape—drips, distant rumbles, metal shudders—frames the Underground as a living organism. This is one of those cases where seeing and hearing it properly is the difference between understanding its reputation and wondering what the fuss is about.

Thematically, the picture keeps pricking at class and neglect without speechifying. The idea that a city could bury its laborers twice—once in life, once in memory—haunts the edges of the plot. Authority figures squabble and deflect while the real problem cries out in a word that it doesn’t fully comprehend. Even the repeated platform announcement, echoed and twisted, becomes a nasty little thesis about systems that warn you to mind the doors while something far worse thrives in the dark a few steps away.

Where does that leave the verdict? This is a compact, atmospheric chiller that earns its cult status through mood, setting, and an unusual compassion for its antagonist. It isn’t a rollercoaster, and it isn’t wrapped up neatly with a bow. It’s a cold walk through a forgotten annex of a great city, led by a detective who sneers his way toward the truth and a lost soul who only knows how to survive. For some, the measured pace and uneven surface cast will cap the ceiling. For others, especially those who prize texture, place, and sorrow over speed, it’s exactly the kind of old horror that gets under the skin and stays there.

Bonus Materials:
Ultra HD Blu-ray (2160p) and HD Blu-ray (1080p) Widescreen 1.85:1 feature presentations
Audio: Dolby Atmos, 5.1 DTS-HD, 1.0 DTS-HD (English); 1.0 DTS-HD (French)
Subtitles: English SDH, Francais, Espanol
Audio Commentary #1 with Co-Writer/Director Gary Sherman, Producer Paul Maslansky, and Assistant Director Lewis More O’Ferrall
NEW! Audio Commentary #2 with Film Historians Nathaniel Thompson and Troy Howarth
Tales From The Tube – Interview with Co-Writer/Director Gary Sherman and Executive Producers Jay Kanter & Alan Ladd Jr.
From The Depths – Interview with Star David Ladd and Producer Paul Maslansky
Mind The Doors – Interview with Star Hugh Armstrong
Trailers
TV Spots
Radio Spots
Poster & Still Gallery

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[photo courtesy of BLUE UNDERGROUND, MVD ENTERTAINMENT]

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