Raw Meat (aka: Death Line) 4K UHD Review

Blue Underground

4K UHD Release: September 30, 2025

Video: 1.85:1/2160p (HDR10/Dolby Vision)/Color

Audio: English Dolby Atmos and DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1; English and French DTS-HD Master Audio 1.0

Subtitles: English SDH, Spanish, French

Run Time: 87:42

Director: Gary Sherman

Note: This update replaces my older review of Arrow’s original Death Line Blu-ray. All sections have been rewritten and reedited.

When a prominent politician and a beautiful young woman vanish inside of a London subway station, Scotland Yard’s Inspector Calhoun (Donald Pleasence) investigates and makes a horrifying discovery. Not only did a group of 19th century tunnel workers survive a cave-in, but they lived for years in a secret underground enclave by consuming the flesh of their own dead. Now, the lone descendant of this grisly tribe has surfaced, prowling the streets for fresh victims… and a new mate. (From Blue Underground’s official synopsis)

Gary Sherman’s Raw Meat (aka: Dead Line, 1972) is the first and still the best of a small, but well-loved subgenre of movies about (usually) cannibalistic, feral people living in underground subway tunnels beneath major cities, who murder and (usually) eat the foolish commuters who breach their domain. Films that followed its lead include Douglas Cheek’s cult-favourite C.H.U.D (1984), Christopher Smith’s Creep (2004 – a film that was accused of ripping Sherman off), Maurice Devereaux’s End of the Line (2007), Ryuhei Kitamura’s The Midnight Meat Train (based on a story by Clive Barker, 2008), and Peter A. Dowling’s (admittedly non-cannibalistic) Stag Night (2008).

Before Raw Meat, Roy Ward Baker’s Hammer-produced sci-fi shocker Quatermass and the Pit (1967) set the precedent for spooky movies taking place in and around the London Tube system and, later, John Landis exploited the location for one of An American Werewolf in London’s (1981) scariest sequences. Like Landis, the Chicago-born Sherman, who co-wrote the script with Ceri Jones, brings an American perspective to an inherently British horror film. Raw Meat’s reputation is usually tied to its violence, which was pretty gruesome for the early ‘70s, but what makes it good is the way it bridges the principles of then-modern American indie horror with the established tones of UK studio horror of Hammer and Amicus.

An old guard of British actors, led by Donald Pleasence, Norman Rossington, and Christopher Lee (in an extended cameo), are set against not alien invaders, the resurrected dead, or vampires, but tragically human creatures. Urban London kin to the rural Texan cannibals of Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974). Dusty castles and opulent mansions are exchanged for dirt-caked catacombs and filth-stained city streets. It’s still Gothic, just a modern Gothic, like the London Gothic answer to Hooper’s Texas Gothic and Martin Scorsese’s New York Gothic. Except that both Chain Saw Massacre and Taxi Driver (1976) were released in the years following Sherman’s film.

The juxtapositions between characters help highlight the theme. Pleasence combats the overwhelmingly bleak atmosphere in a most English fashion – with a stiff upper-lip, working class demeanor, and snappy, sarcastic dialogue (the only thing that gets him riled is a bad cup of tea). His ghoulish irony in the face of unrelenting violence is a nice contrast against the mercilessly indifferent people populating the film and some of the other central performances, namely David Ladd’s grumbling romantic lead (himself another Chicago native), the forlorn cannibal man (Hugh Armstrong), and Christopher Lee’s classist MI5 antagonist (in a brief cameo). Only the impossibly empathetic Patricia (Sharon Gurney) isn’t an amusingly callous dickhead.

In the years that followed, Sherman made the fantastic, Dan O’Bannon co-scripted shocker Dead & Buried (1981) and the beloved, non-horror, pure exploitation vehicle known as Vice Squad (1982).

Video

I’m not sure if Raw Meat was ever released on North American VHS (according to commentator Troy Howarth, it wasn’t). Eventually, MGM put out a decent, barebones, anamorphic DVD of the unrated cut. Blue Underground’s Blu-ray debut (which was delayed a bit after the initial announcement, presumably because they found a better source?) was created using a 2K scan of the original, uncensored camera negative. All of the clean-up and grading was approved by Sherman himself. That already nice upgrade is being upgraded again with another brand-new restoration, this time scanned in 4K/16-bit, also from the original uncensored camera negative. 

Blue Underground has included a Blu-ray copy of the new scan, which I have used for the screencaps and comparison sliders on this page. As you can see in the two sliders (4K remaster left, 2K remaster right), even without the benefit of the extra 2160p resolution and HDR/Dolby Vision boost, the 4K remaster is an upgrade in terms of clarity and color complexity (note things like warmer skin tones and better defined brown piping on Pleasence’s coat), and all without sacrificing cinematographer Alex Thomson’s commitment to extreme darkness. With the benefit of extra resolution and HDR, the UHD’s transfer features fine, unobtrusive film grain, stronger overall texture, and richer reds and blues. The basic griminess is maintained, just without the old Blu-ray’s digital noise issues and occasionally muddied shadow details. It’s still very dark, though, don’t worry.

Audio

Raw Meat is presented with a new Dolby Atmos remix, as well as a DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 downmix and the original mono, in uncompressed DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0. I’m never a big fan of multi-channel redesigns of single-channel tracks and mostly opted to watch the film in mono, but will admit that the remix is respectful and generally improves the quality of composer Wil Malone’s music. The mono mix still sounds more authentic to my ears and reproduces cleaner dialogue.

That’s important, because the dialogue and incidental effects are largely muffled, no matter how you watch Raw Meat, be it 4K, Blu-ray, DVD, or even VHS. On set recording simply wasn’t very good, made all the more apparent by some pretty obvious ADR. Back to the music – the score is charmingly bizarre at times, mixing synth-based stripper rock and abstract analogue noise with weirdly whimsical clarinet motifs and truly mournful string work. On either track, the music exhibits nice depth and rarely distorts, though it is mixed relatively low on the mono option.

Extras

Disc 1 (4K UHD)

• Commentary with director Gary Sherman, producer Paul Maslansky, and assistant director Lewis More O’Ferrall, moderated Blue Underground’s David Gregory – Sherman leads the discussion on this informative and good-natured commentary. Gregory does an admirable job shifting focus and moving things along, while Maslansky & O’Ferrall fill the extra space with oodles of charming behind-the-scenes anecdotes. 

• Commentary with Nathaniel Thompson and Troy Howarth – In this brand new commentary, Howarth, the author of Real Depravities: The Films of Klaus Kinski (CreateSpace, 2016), and Mondo Digital head Thompson explore the careers of the cast & crew, the performances and characters, the wider context of early ‘70s London, comparisons to similar films, and the film’s awkward release and censorship it faced.

• Death Line and Raw Meat trailers, three Raw Meat TV spots, and two Raw Meat radio spots

• Poster & still gallery

Disc 2 (Blu-ray)

• The film (1080p version of the 4K remaster)

• Commentary with director Gary Sherman, producer Paul Maslansky, and assistant director Lewis More O’Ferrall, moderated Blue Underground’s David Gregory

• Commentary with Nathaniel Thompson and Troy Howarth 

• Tales From The Tube (18:51, HD) – The featurettes begin with a roundtable interview between Sherman and executive producers Jay Kanter & Alan Ladd Jr. The discussion mostly covers the pre-production/financing processes (a young Jonathan Demme was a fan of the script and almost a producer), early casting (Marlon Brando was sought for the cannibal man role), finding locations on-the-cheap, and distribution. 

• From The Depths (12:41, HD) – In this continuation of the previous roundtable, star David Ladd and producer Paul Maslansky talk about the film. They praise Sherman, Donald Pleasence, and the rest of the cast, but are also sort of mystified by the fact that talented, well-known actors wanted anything to do with the project.

• Mind The Doors (15:36, HD) – In the final interview, actor Hugh Armstrong recalls his career, scoring the role of Raw Meat’s sad cannibal, embodying the character, the creature make-up, and working with the cast & crew.

• Death Line and Raw Meat trailers, three Raw Meat TV spots, and two Raw Meat radio spots

• Poster & still gallery

The images on this page are taken from the Blue Underground’s 4K remastered BD  – NOT the 4K UHD – as well as the original BU 2K remastered BD, and sized for the page. Larger versions can be viewed by right/cmd-clicking each side of the sliders. Note that there will be some JPG compression.