Three on a Meathook (1972)

Really Surprised!

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

Four girls go on a romping weekend at a lake, and have car problems on the way home. A nice local boy takes them back to his farm, where he lives with his father. Something ghastly happens, but the father helps his son as he has in the past. When the boy meets a girl and begins falling in love, the father worries about a repeat performance.Hot girl nudity from frame one.Really low budget deal. There is one scene on a dock and the camera was going up and down with the waves. Very 70s schlock. This was the director's second film. He only made a few others for he died in Manilla in a plane accident at age 30. Who knows what other trash he could have made had he lived? There's actually a minute or two in the film where the frame is all blacked out but you can hear the girls talking!The film has a bit of the flavor of I Spit on your Grave, which is a classic.It's reasonably well directed for the genre. But unsure why this is called three on a meat hook. There aren't really any meat-hooks. And the film sort of disintegrates before you get to the middle. To bad. Could have been good.

Weird.First, this is obviously an attempt to grab on the "son-mother" "Psychoesque" dynamic - but on a serious budget. A seriously limited one. I give high points for above the standard for the genre writing and overall story structure then am forced to downgrade it all because the acting of several key characters was so gawdalmighty bad the whole secret was telegraphed in the first third of the film.Running only 77 minutes and feeling as if it ran MUCH longer, actually (enough of the guitar music and the golden fields, okay??) we get well-written and uncharacteristically introspective speeches coming from characters which could have been played by better actors. It tried so hard to be deep, perhaps profound, but no. Bad acting. That snarled the whole business up more than anything else. This film also holds the record as having the worst, the most horrible audio blooper in the history of talkie films IMO. It goes like this: There's a sequence in the first third or so ... let's just say "the morning after..." where Dad and Son are having a conversation. Outside on a farm. Opening and closing doors and gates with all sorts of normal country life activity, yet their conversation sounds as if it had been recorded in the Grand Canyon. Damn distracting, especially the closeups where you could really see the dialog dubbed and that which was filmed were nowhere near in synch. Now, what did come out particularly nasty were the kills. Coupled with the gritty, cheap (16mm?) stock they were using, and the real location shooting (really nice house BTW.I liked it), the whole work carried almost the appearance of an early snuff film with a raw documentary feel to the cinematography.The music score was utterly bizarre. Ranging from some bizarre tweetling like the dying gasp of an ancient Farfisa organ to wildly inappropriate jamming in places best kept quiet, it alternated between excellent and "PLEASE STFU!!" There was also an extended bar scene with a not-too-bad late 60s style Strawberry Alarm Clock/Doors-ish mod psych group which - mostly for padding purposes - got rather a lot of screen time. I FFWD just a little bit, to get the two of them across that damn golden field and get on with the story.Not utterly unwatchable, but don't expect even bush-grade acting chops here. 61/100

"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."

If I had a dollar for every time I heard that phrase coined in horror film history I'd be a millionaire! Here is yet another schlock filled shocker that tries to cash in on the infamous true-life ghoul Ed Gein. Although this film can legitimately stand on it's own merit as well. It is a decent piece of grainy, drive-in style schlock with a "surprise" twist ending. The love-story angle is a bit drawn out and this film could use a bit more blood and guts but otherwise this isn't nearly as dreadful a film as you might expect. With a title like "Three on a Meathook" one expects to see lots of gore so the film is a slight let down in that department but it is definitely worth at least a one time glance.