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| From http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-9zHzzN8rENI/URCW4q9bvuI/ AAAAAAAAD6s/Z-vs1hDNBDg/s400/DEATH+LINE+-+Silver+Ferox+Design.jpg |
Dir. Gary Sherman
Death Line is undermined by its slightly disjointed structure. Not
much threat actually takes place when you think about it. And yet this is why,
before this problem arises, why I found this a lot more interesting than other
British horror films. At a certain underground railway station, people are
vanishing, a subterranean being preying on the unsuspecting public, the
ordinary man to a lord which kicks off the police enquiry by the eccentric Inspector
Calhoun (Donald Pleasance) to
investigate what is going on. It's also amazing how violent and nasty the film
actually is. It's not a gorefest, or able to match up to films from the period
let alone now, but with its rotting corpses, head trauma, and a central idea I
won't reveal because its only introduced part of the way through, it's amazing
how lurid British genre cinema got in the period. Films like this and sleazier
works managed to exist despite how severe British film censorship was at the
time, and to encounter these films is a shock. It's a very low budget movie, a
small cast consisting of a couple, an American student (David Ladd) and his
British girlfriend (Sharon Gurney), Pleasance
and one of his detectives (Norman Rossington), and one or two characters. Christopher Lee makes a cameo but
unfortunately is in only one scene, and despite the promise of Lee and Pleasance onscreen, it's clear they may have been filmed separately,
speaking directly to the camera as each one is cut to-and-from in their bitchy
dialogue to each other. The prescience of Lee
emphasies how radically different a film like this is from a Hammer production. Contemporary, set in
the scuzzy streets with strip clubs and the underground, the old architecture
of the turn of the century, bringing in the failures and greed of our
great-grandfathers being responsible for the creature in the abandoned tunnels,
against the then-contemporary locations and culture, British but also American
with youth radicals and Jimi Hendrix posters.
There is some nasty gore, decay and Pleasance
mouthing "fuck" in disgust
at Lee, the idea of Lee himself even saying a mild curse
word, or existing in a non gothic or classical horror film, outside of the
image he has, and furthering the split this film makes from the older tradition
of British horror.
Pleasance, pre-Halloween (1978), is so drastically
different from his Dr. Loomis persona. Either it's a put-on accent or his real
one exaggerated, complaining about the tea, taking tea bags out of his cup with
a playing dart of all things, and more than twice, and stealing the film with
his complete lack of care for other people's thoughts or following procedure. It's
a great thing to see a vastly different performance from him, and the film itself
is just interesting. Its failing is that it's a slight film, not going any
further with its small cast. The central idea is interesting, of a being lurking
underground, like us but through a radical, decades changing effect causing
them to be a drastically different being whose only understandable words is a
phrase used in the subway lingo above. Its great I didn't have to put up with
all those crassly lazy plot tropes usually set upon you viewing most horror
films - that people aren't believed, that the police are incompetent, just
liable to get drunk the night before in this and suffering from hangovers, and
having to wait for events to happen. It structure does sadly undermine any
sense of a great finale, ending with somewhat of a whimper, but that could have
been prevented with better writing. It looks good, has the ideas, and has
probably one of the technically applaudable moments in a genre film like this,
a long continuous camera turning around numerous times and examining an
environment that, even if hidden edits were used, is still exceptional. It's a fascinating
example of how British horror can have teeth, but could have been made better.
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