Death Line. 1972. Great Britain. Directed by Gary Sherman. Screenplay by Ceri Jones. With Donald Pleasence, Norman Rossington, David Ladd, Sharon Gurney, Hugh Armstrong, Christopher Lee. DCP. 87 min.
American director Gary Sherman’s fusion of British class humor with grisly horror was a singular achievement in the exploitation market of its day. Esteemed genre critic Robin Wood went as far as comparing its horridness to George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. In science fiction, terror commonly appears from above; in creature features it frequently lurks below. The sinister disappearance of a distinguished member of the upper class from an Underground railway platform leads to a confrontation with the last survivor of a tunnel-dwelling community who’ve been living off kidnapped commuters for a century. The endearing street-level humanity of the genre’s stalwart cynic, Donald Pleasence, is an effective counterweight to Hugh Armstrong’s monstrous, subterranean depravity. Sherman’s melancholy tracking shots across an ossuary of moldering corpses, whose long-forgotten social standing is signaled by dusty jewelry and rotting clothes, is memorably chilling.