Three on a Meathook

Taking a page from Psycho's playbook, Three on a Meathook opens with 4 young woman looking for a good time and finding themselves stranded when their car breaks down. They're found by a good samaritan named Billy who takes them back to the farmhouse that he and his odd father share in the country. As the night progresses, each girl comes to a nasty end and Billy's father is scared that his son has relapsed into his old murderous ways. As Billy struggles to keep his sanity, he meets a waitress who he falls for. Will he able able to keep her murderous cravings at bay and start a new life with her?

Three on a Meathook won't win any awards for fantastic cinematography or wonderful acting. If anything, these are the things that keep the film down. It feels like it's everyone's first time making a movie both in front of and behind the camera and some of the actors feel like they're playing to the back row of a community theatre house with every word overennunciated to freakish effect. It does give the film an odd quality that sometimes benefits low budget horror films like this.

The story itself is obviously a riff on Psycho, but had it been written with a little more skill and finesse, it could have really been something great. As is, it's still incredibly entertaining and, at about 70 minutes, it does get to the nitty gritty of things pretty quickly, but there's a more interesting psychological character study in here.

I came across this movie in Psychotronic Movie Guide Vol I, and was surprised I could watch it on YouTube. I have done this for Ms. 45, went a few years back to the movie house re release and bought the Blu Ray. What I say on YouTube was unimpressive, the script really was the problem, as the story does not flow as in Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I suspect this was the director first or one of his early movies and did not attend film school, and this is true for many independent directors who learned what they could from other directors and production staff including Clint Eastwood. While TCM plays like a reality movies TOaMC is more like a HS dropouts nightmare and I would not have done any better. Watch it, just to say you included it in your viewing history of B movies, but try to watch it free the first time before you invest in a copy.

Ultra-low-budget, skid row version of Psycho lands firmly in the category of so-bad-its-good!

Why is it that every time handsome, young Billy brings a girl home that she ends up butchered?

One of a number of drive-in horror flicks that William Girdler made in the '70's, this one being fairly memorable. As with many films of its budget, the raw, natural settings add to the moody believability of the picture. James Pickett turns in a decent performance as the films main character, who seems to have some problems indeed. Charles Kissinger plays off well enough as Pickett's odd father. Girdler gives the film a gritty, but nicely moody music score.

As with many exploitation films of its day, there's plenty of gore and skin to see. After all, what would you expect from a movie with this memorable title!

All in all, Three on a Meathook is a film that's certainly not for all tastes! Fans of the B genre, especially from this era will likely enjoy this horrific and unintentional funny flick.

** 1/2 out of ****

A group of shapely girls get stranded near an isolated farmhouse(so far so formulaic)and are given shelter by a young man and his father who inhabit the house. The father wants the girls out, hinting at disaster("Billy, I don't want to be unreasonable, but you know how you get around women...")which of course comes true when the chicks get the axe...literally.

Okay, so it looks to be shaping up to be a run-of-the-mill gore film, but insert a love interest for the confounded Billy, a college-dropout-turned-cocktail-waitress, and the love story element is underway. The couple wander through meadows of goldenrod while the girl explains all this(the college drop-out bit)and Billy agrees to invite his new squeeze and her friend to his farm, where there's more talky character development(on the part of the friend, who spouts some kind of florid anti-Vietnam rhetoric in regard to her dead boyfriend)and all the horror of the killings is revealed! And the epilogue is unusual in that it actually gives promise for Billy and his girlfriend's future!

Okay, so maybe it's a stretch to say this is a decent movie, but come on, how many gore films even attempt any character development? You almost feel sorry for Billy and his plight. The dialogue leans toward more overripeness than camp, and so the dialogue seems more like TV movie of the week fare than Ed Wood. Still, it is an unusual flick.

What makes "Three on a Meathook" a balls-out real horror film? It's the fact that it looks like a home movie a serial killer would make. It looks like, after finding a 16mm camera in one of his victim's houses, some serial killer got a few of his demented buddy's together, put some ad in the paper for cheap talent, and tried to make a movie. In one of the earliest scenes where the father is berating the son you can see that, although the actors keep screwing up their lines they kept filming and left it in the final print. The grainy stock of the film, the inventive although cheap special effects, and the down-trodden feel of this picture really put you into the subconscious pocket of something brewing in a crude psychopath's mind. Scene after scene is dragged out mercilessly as the filmmakers try to fill the legal feature-length time. One scene has the son sitting in a bar watching the band AMERICAN XPRESS play through two lackluster 70's contemporary tunes. This had me wondering what ever happened to American Xpress, the band featured in some serial killer's home movie "Three on a Meathook"? I wont spoil the end for you, but I will say that you do not watch this movie with the expectation of being entertained: you watch it to experience something a blood-letter would dream.