Violence/Gore: Some gruesome shots of half-eaten corpses, sore-ridden cannibal mutants moaning and impaling people, and wanton rat-chewing help to punch up the otherwise flat proceedings.

Sex/Nudity: Intrepid heroine Pat fends off the violent advances of the cannibal killer, but Alex arrives to save her before things get out of hand.

Best Line: “You expect to find Manfred pressed between the pages of a book?”

Score:

When a prominent member of the British upper class goes missing in the London Underground, Inspector Calhoun (Donald Pleasence) swings into action…which is to say he demands tea, plays a horrible game of darts on the back of his office door, and yells at his subordinates and men with long hair and flower-bedecked shirts. The culprit? A cannibalistic mutant, the last survivor of a tribe that lived in a disused Underground tunnel after a cave-in trapped their ancestors almost a hundred years earlier.

While often dull as dishwater and padded out with long tracking shots and almost silent passages of cinematic boredom that turn a 40-minute plot into an 87-minute exercise in tedium, the movie–known as DEATH LINE in its original UK release–is worth seeing if, like me, you’re a fan of the superb Donald Pleasence. This is Pleasence’s movie without a doubt; his Calhoun is not entirely a likeable fellow, but a man of miniscule means, even more miniscule manners, and an unhealthy suspicion of virtually everyone and everything around him. “Jaded” only begins to capture the essence of the man, but Pleasence manages to make him as playful and light-hearted as he is dour and paranoid. One almost wishes that the film had sparked further adventures for Calhoun, but alas.

Christopher Lee is also billed, but this is a seriously low budget movie, so your first question should be–how much did Lee get to show up for his few minutes of screen time? His scene is an incongruous one as well, shot with Lee delivering his lines entirely to camera, leaving one with the vague suspicion that he wasn’t even on set with the rest of the cast (in his final shot, you do in fact see that he’s there at the same time as Pleasence). Clearly brought in to cameo for the marquee value, Lee is wasted in a meaningless scene that adds nothing to the plot and only briefly delays Calhoun in his investigation into the disappearance of the missing upper-cruster.

For gorehounds, there’s quite a bit of bright red paint…er, blood…and some gruesome picked-over corpses. Some might cringe to see our cannibal friend tear the head off a rat with his teeth, but let’s face it, none of these effects will confuse you as to their utter lack of reality.

Our nominal hero is Alex, a long-haired abrasive American student pulled right out of the British “Let’s Make Fun of the Long-Haired Abrasive American Student” playbook. His whining girlfriend Pat looks like a heroin addict, and the mumbling cannibal who can only articulate the Underground warning, “Mind the doors,” is a less than compelling villain. Only Pleasence makes the whole experience anything other than a nightmare. See! Pleasence drunk! See! Pleasence complaining about tea bags! See! Pleasence rushing in at the end to take charge when the other characters just happen to stumble on the cannibal’s lair and solve the whole thing, rendering Pleasence’s participation absolutely worthless! See! Pleasence!

And Christopher Lee too, but only for a few minutes. Mind the doors!

DVD Extras: Just the trailer for the American release.

ATB