Raw Meat

RAW MEAT

An early-seventies horror film that was originally titled Death Line, Raw Meat follows three main characters (two college students who are dating plus the local police force’s Inspector Calhoun) as they stumble into a mystery concerning people who have gone missing in the Russell Square subway station of London.  The university students (Alex and Patricia) notice a man prone on the stairs leading out of the station after they exit the last train of the night.  They check his wallet to see if he has a card identifying him as a diabetic (he does not) and take note of his name.  They head up and notify a police officer of the situation, but the fellow’s gone when they all return.  Inspector Calhoun takes an interest in the case because the missing fellow (James Manfred) is a member of the Order of the British Empire.  Calhoun notes that a couple of other people went missing with their last known locations being that subway station.  Turns out there’s a feral and diseased man who lives deep underground in an abandoned space that was intended to be another subway station but was never completed after a cave-in at the turn of the century trapped several men and women who were presumed dead.  The feral man is a descendant of those trapped in the accident – they survived and reproduced.  The lone survivor of this strange inbred lineage periodically ventures into the subway station to procure fresh human flesh to sustain him.  In the third act, he kidnaps Patricia and takes her to his lair.  Alex goes searching for her and ultimately finds her alive and fights with the feral man.  Law enforcement officials (led by Calhoun) also show up and discover the feral man’s gruesome lair full of bones and partially-decayed bodies.

Raw Meat sports some surprisingly graphic images of corpses in the feral man’s domain.  The tale is oddly-paced and slow to really get underway, but the final twenty minutes or so are quite engaging as the viewer wonders what will become of Patricia.  Donald Pleasence portrays Inspector Calhoun (a tea addict) and brings a layer of dry humor to some scenes, thereby balancing out the rather grim nature of the story’s main threads.  Christopher Lee has a cameo in a scene that feels out of place (as if it were shoehorned in just for the sake of having another famous actor show up).  An interesting glimpse of London as it existed over four decades ago, Raw Meat is a flawed but engaging film that could have benefited from a faster pace and a couple of additional scenes in which the feral man stalks and attacks victims.  I’m glad I finally got around to seeing this movie.  Rumor has it that the project’s director (Gary Sherman) will be helming a remake set in Chicago.