They don't grind 'em out like "Raw Meat" anymore. I don't know if horror movies will ever seem as seedy as they did in the first half of the 1970s, when even the emulsion itself seemed to carry dread and disease. In this British horror-thriller, released in the UK as "Death Line" and directed by Gary Sherman ("Dead & Buried"), there's Something in the Underground. Yes, there's a through-line to "The Descent" here. And Guillermo Del Toro ("Cronos," "The Devil's Backbone," "Pan's Labyrinth") considers it one of his favorites.
A Semi-Important Brit (with mustache and bowler hat) is seen checking out various porn shops and strip clubs in a seamy area of London, before descending into subway where he attempts to pick up a prostitute and is then found dead. That begins an investigation by Inspector Calhoun (a tartly over-caffeinated Donald Pleasence) and long-suffering Detective Sergeant Rogers (Norman Rossington -- the put-upon manager, Norm, from "A Hard Day's Night"). Christopher Lee also appears as an MI5 operative, doing what seems to be a nutty send-up of Patrick MacNee's Steed on "The Avengers."
The opening shot itself begins with an out-of-focus blur of colors, accompanied by a dirty, grinding, sluggish, metallic guitar/bass/drums riff that sounds like Angelo Badalamenti's score for the endless-nightmare Roadhouse scene in David Lynch's "Twin Peaks; Fire Walk with Me." As the image comes into focus we see a Magritte-like silhouette of a British gent looking at dirty magazines. Then the shot goes out of focus again. The pattern is repeated throughout the titles sequence as the naughty fellow visits one unseemly establishment after another: out of focus (indistinguishable, unidentifiable); then in focus (ah, that's what we're seeing/where we are); then back out again. And, wouldn't you know it, that's the shape of the mystery (and the investigation) itself: Someone's whereabouts are unknown. Then he is seen. Then he disappears. The aim is to fill in those out-of-focus parts, to figure out where he came from, how he got there, and where he went.
I'm sure "Raw Meat" is not as shocking as it must have seemed in 1972, but Sherman's use of real, atmospheric locations is still eerily effective. And for fans of long takes, this guy loves 'em! There are whole stretches where the camera simply prowls around underground, revealing its horrors one by one. The film was cut for its original release in the UK -- some gore, a bit with a rat's head, an attempted rape -- and wasn't passed by the censors until the DVD release in 2006.
Jim, I finally made it to Raw Meat over the weekend. This movie is an extraordinary shocker, and funny as hell too-- I've never seen Donald Pleasance so delightfully unhinged. Nor have I seen a horror movie with quite so much empathy for its devil-- perhaps Psycho, but Norman Bates looked, for all intents and purposes "normal," thus a far easier visage with whom to sympathize. (And it didn't hurt that he was victimized and abused by Mother all those years). But when we finally get to the buried secton of the Underground and Sherman gives us that eye-popping long-take tour of the fiend's various grotesqueries, we realize this movie's fiend is not so handsome and composed as Norman Bates. We also end up seeing something that is equally shocking and perplexing, and a reminder of who this "man" once was-- the beast tending to his wife, who is in the process of dying in childbirth, leaving him as the last survivor among generations of survivors of a ghastly injustice at the hands of the company that contracted the tunneling and left all those workers, men and women, to supposedly suffocate. And once this woman does die, we are allowed entrance into the quarters where the remainder of the half-rotted corpses of the rest of these victims lie in state, each one adorned with a bauble or piece of jewelry laid upon their chest in mournful memoriam. We see the moment when this "man" picks a pocket watch out of the pocket of the film's Magritte-esque opening victim and lays it on her chest. Everything this fiend does from this point on in Raw Meat is informed by the sadness and injustice of his fate and that of his fellow victims, as well as his desperation to save his mate (this includes, I think, his attempt to communicate with the film's heroine, the failure of which, unfortunately, leads to that attempted rape). This information is not used to justify the horrors he perpetrates, but to contextualize them, to expand them beyond mindless cannibalistic attacks. "Mind the doors!" Thanks so much for pointing this one out to me, Jim. I can't believe I was unaware of it for so long!
(I'll be checking in on The Black Dahlia soon too-- finally saw it this weekend.)
JE: Glad you appreciated "Raw Meat," Dennis! (I was thinking of it in Toronto, where the subway signs say "Mind the gap.") I'll be very interested to read what you have to say about "The Black Dahlia" -- and, of course, "Jackass Number Two"!