Raw Meat (aka Deathline or Death Line) is a 1973 horror film directed by Gary Sherman, an Americann filmmaker living in England at the time. Directly inspired by the popular legend of Scottish cannibal Sawney Beane, it is the tale of the sole surviving descendant of a group of tunnel-workers living in a disused section of the London Underground subway system. When the cannibal kidnaps and kills an important politician, he is hunted by a detective as well as an American student and his English girlfriend who were the last to see the victim in the tube station.
Some aspects of the film have caused it to enjoy a favorable critical reputation over the years. Sherman directs the film with a documentarian's sense of detachment, for example, panning slowly across the cannibal's "larder" filled with human cadavers in various stages of decay; the effect is gory but lacking in the sensationalism common to most low-budget horror productions. The portrayal of Detective Calhoun by the late Donald Pleasance has also been praised for the actor's making a three-dimensional character out of a stereotype, and actor Hugh Armstrong gives the revolting figure of the cannibal some Frankenstein-like pathos.
There was no legitimate home video release of the film in the United States until September 2003, when it was released on DVD.
