Looking for some less obvious horror flicks to shudder through this coming Halloween? You could do a lot worse than the 10 overlooked British curios listed here…
Every Halloween, the DVD racks fill up with box sets and toothless remakes. We’re encouraged to dig out the same old warhorses or watch the latest group of pneumatic teens get shish-kebabed by yet another mouth breather in a cheap mask. But look a little closer to home and there’s a wealth of solid schlock to be explored.
Here’s a quick – and very subjective – list of ten Brit curios you might want to spend your pennies on, in order to ease you through the spookiest of holidays.
Death Line (1973)
An endearingly grubby 70s tragi-horror, heavy with sleaze and cut to a wonderfully funky soundtrack. A cave-in traps a group of Victorian tunnel workers deep in the London underground and, decades later, the last of their descendants has become a gibbering wreck who survives by picking off late-night stragglers and dragging them back to his bone-strewn lair for a quick spot of supper.
Donald Pleasance gives it both barrels as the perma-sozzled inspector hard on the cannibal’s case, and Hugh Armstrong delivers a sterling performance as ‘The Man’ whose only dialogue, “Mind the doors”, gets more varied line readings than the B-roll on a Will Ferrell flick.
Death Line (also known as Raw Meat) was a clear influence on Christopher Smith’s Creep (though the director has insisted that he hadn’t seen it), but with additional colour and a spot of inspired nastiness at the business end of a spade. Christopher Lee drops by for the briefest of cameos, barely raising an eyebrow in the process.
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