BA_Harrison Low budget drive-in horror Three On A Meathook opens in fine exploitative fashion with a naked young blonde frolicking with her man (instant gratuitous female nudity: always a winner). She hops out of bed, slips into a vest top and hot-pants and goes to meet three girlfriends for a weekend of boating and skinny dipping (more nudity). Experiencing car trouble while driving back from the lake, the four girls find themselves stranded in the middle of nowhere, but are rescued by passing motorist Billy (James Carroll Pickett), who invites them to stay the night at his pa's farm. None of them make it to the morning alive: one is stabbed while in the bath (even more nudity), two are blasted with a shotgun, and the last is beheaded with an axe. So far, so entertaining.Sadly, the film goes seriously downhill after this…Billy's father, shocked at his son's behaviour, sends the lad into town while he cleans up the mess. Cue an awful lot of padding to beef up the running time, Billy mooching through the streets, taking in a band (who play two songs in their entirety), and visiting a bar, where he meets lovely waitress Sherry (Sherry Steiner), who takes the lad home. Waking up the next morning in bed with Sherry, who is still very much alive, Billy decides to spend the day with the girl, which results in a whole lot more filler, as the couple get to know each other. Before Billy leaves, he invites Sherry to his home, who turns up at the farm a few days later with friend Becky (Madelyn Buzzard). Director William Girdler pads out the running time even further as Billy, Sherry and Becky enjoy the simple pleasures of the countryside. Boring, boring, boring.Thankfully, things pick up again for the finish, poor Becky getting a pick-axe in her chest, and Sherry confronted by the killer (who, in a not very clever twist, is exactly who you probably thought it was about an hour earlier). It's during this climax that we finally see the Three On A Meathook—for all of a couple of seconds.

bean-d "Three on a Meathook" (1972) should really be titled "Three on Three Meathooks" or "Three Each Having Her Own Meathook," but I suppose those latter two don't sound quite as good. The film rips off "Psycho" quite liberally. (I suppose if it had had a bigger budget and a better director we would have called it an homage.) The film opens with a woman making clandestine love to a man, although here we have nudity in contrast to "Psycho"'s mere intimations of sex. She leaves for the weekend with her girlfriends and they all skinny-dip in a remote part of the state. When their car breaks down, they hitch a ride with a nice farm boy named Billy who offers to let them stay the night at his place. Billy's father is angry that he brought the girls, insinuating that Billy is psychotic and he should never be around girls. (Billy's mother had been killed in an accident while he was living at his aunt's house a while before.) That night the girls are all brutally murdered (and predating "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" by two years, this film is far gorier). Billy awakens in the morning and his father tells him to look in the house and see what he's done. He sends Billy to town for the day while he cleans up. Billy meets a nice girl and invites her to his farm. She brings her girlfriend and they spend the night. (An odd decision for someone who thinks he may be psychotic, and who knows that multiple murders have just taken place on his farm!) While "Three on a Meathook" is surprisingly explicit for 1972 with plenty of nudity and graphic gore, the film is quite interesting when considered as part of the emergence of the anti-rural film. The film is blatant in its use of the city and the country, the former representing sanity, the latter insanity. The girls who are first murdered are safe in the confines of the city; indeed, they are streetwise and sexually confident. When they find themselves in the country, however, they must rely on the kindness of strangers (to borrow a phrase). The clear message is that such trust is dangerous in the rural environs--and once the violence starts, all the street-wisdom in the world ain't a-gonna help. There are no policemen to call, no bargaining techniques to employ, no safe places to run.Billy is sent from the scene of the country carnage to the city where he encounters an uninhibited '70s college dropout named Sherry. She is a waitress in a bar, taking pity on this troubled farm boy as he gets drunker and drunker. When he is too drunk to leave the bar, Sherry takes him to her place rather than having him tossed out into the street. She even takes off his pants for him when he has an "accident" and puts him into her own bed where the two sleep together chastely naked. They spend the next day falling in love. Billy invites her to his farm that weekend and she accepts.When Sherry arrives at the farm with her girlfriend, the two city girls are entranced by the beauty of the place. Billy's father, however, is drunk and he offers less than a warm welcome. We are still not sure who is the killer, Billy or his father, but we know that this distant farmhouse is no place for two city girls. In the morning Sherry looks for her friend, discovers dead bodies in the barn, and is almost killed herself. Again, the insanity out here in the country seems plausible simply because there are no prying eyes, no methods of surveillance, no bureaucrats whose job it is to discover and regulate the insane. And when the violence starts, who can Sherry turn to? The concluding scene is of a big city high-rise. The camera holds the scene for a moment, and then closes in on one of the higher levels of the building. We feel an immediate sense of relief, knowing that the rural madness cannot come here, that the violent chaos of that world will find no purchase in such obvious civilization. We see Billy and his girlfriend talking to a refined and intelligent psychiatrist who explains in very banal terms the unfortunate madness that was allowed to flourish on the farm. Although it is not overtly stated, we clearly understand that had Billy's father and mother lived in the city, none of this would have taken place--or if it had taken place, it would have been caught and contained much sooner. The final scene shows Billy's insane father safely in a straitjacket in a rubber room. Civilization has contained and triumphed--as it so self-evidently should.While "Three on a Meathook" is a surprisingly vile film for 1972, it is a stellar example of the newly emerging anti-rural film--a genre that became even more entrenched that same year with "Deliverance."

Coventry Okay, admittedly, "Three on a Meathook" is a pretty damn terrible, god-awful film and most normal people will probably find it an unendurable cinematic experience to sit through. The production values are unimaginably poor, the supposedly shocking plot twists are laughably predictable, the acting performances are miserable, the photography and editing are hideously amateurish and, even with a running time of barely 80 minutes, at least half of the film is purely redundant padding footage. But still, regardless of all its shortcoming and stupidities, I can list numerous reasons why this sickly gem ranks amongst my all-time favorite early 70's grindhouse flicks. So, in case you insist on reading an unbiased and twenty-four carat objective review, you should probably quit reading mine right now… First and foremost, "Three on a Meathook" was the debut of devoted horror writer/director William Girdler. Girdler was clearly horror-obsessed at young age already and remained extremely busy during the next six years of his well-filled but painfully too short career. He was barely 25 years old when he debuted with this gritty "Psycho"-inspired shocker, but the film itself also inspired a whole series of grainy redneck-horrors, maybe even including Tobe Hooper's classic "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre". Girdler then quickly specialized in cashing in on contemporary popular trends in the horror industry. He made his very own violent-cop-above-the-law flick ("The Zebra Killer"), as well as Blaxploitation films ("Sheba, Baby", "Abby") and a Satanic Cult movie ("Asylum of Satan"). His most famous films are the notorious Jaws-on-land classic "Grizzly" and his supremely demented imitation of "The Exorcist", entitled "The Manitou". William Girdler died at the tender age of 30, when his helicopter crashed whilst spotting locations for already another film. With NINE fine movies in just 6 years, imagine what he could have achieved if he hadn't sat foot in that helicopter … Back to "Three on a Meathook" specifically; this film is to me the purest embodiment of devoted early 70's grindhouse film-making. Girdler didn't have much of a budget to work with, but nearly every penny he did have went straight to the accomplishment of bloody make-up effects and scenery to make the film appear more grim & disturbing. This film is politically incorrect as hell, with uncompromising gore and gratuitous nudity aplenty, and the main characters are your average and stereotypical "dumb" countryside folks. Clumsily disguised as a tragic love-story, "Three on a Meathook" serves one deviant story twisted after another (although, admittedly, with some dreadful musical interludes and pointless "we're falling in love" montages in between) and the wholesome works towards an indescribably frenzied climax.The film opens with the clichéd premise of four young girls deciding to go camping in a remote woodsy area. One topless swimming party and multiple girlish chuckles later, their car breaks down in the middle of the night, but the simple-minded farmer's boy Billy – who previously observed the girls as they were skinny dipping - comes to the rescue and invites them to spend the night at the farm with himself and pa. The father worriedly warns Billy about what happens when he gets "too close" to girls, but the next morning the girls are all reduced to lifeless corpses. When going into town to drink away his misery, Billy falls in love with a waitress and takes her and a friend back to the farm where the horror threatens to repeat itself. You don't exactly have to be Sherlock Holmes to figure out the truth behind the murders, but still the script provides an extra ingenious (and practically unpredictable) twist at the very end of the film. The narrative structure is wildly uneven and the padding footage is horrible, but the at least sequences that truly matter are morbidly atmospheric and misogynistic. If you're into this type of questionable cinema, I can't recommend "Three on a Meathook" wholeheartedly enough. That's a guarantee, because I have yet to encounter a grindhouse fanatic who doesn't appreciate hatchet murders, pick-axe horror, stabbing and nasty meat-cleavers.

dominusluna This film starts out good but get's very very slow. A few kills in the beginning but then nothing for a long long time. I'd say more of a drama than a horror film as it's pretty slow and has a little romance thing going on. This movie doesn't even come close to the hype that the title portrays. It's not exactly lame but not far from it. Very slow and drama-like for most part of the movie. I had to ramble and repeat things because this requires that you use a minimum of 10 lines. All I really wanted to say was that this film is pretty slow outside the starting point but then gets really slow soon after. It's a kind of cool story but nowhere as near as notorious as the title offers. I'd almost call it a drama if not for the beginning.