William "Billy" Girdler's (Manitou) Three on a Meathook (1972) has a little cult reputation as it's supposed to be based on the infamous Ed Gein case, a case that has been the inspiration for some other films, too, like Deranged (Jeff Gillen & Alan Ormsby, 1974) and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974) and of course the 2000 production Ed Gein by Chuch Parello, the man behind the (awful) sequel Henry 2 (1998) to John McNaughton's masterful Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986). Three on a Meathook however is a very poor and slow slasher attempt that hasn't got after all pretty much to do with the actual case from the real life, except that these both men kill people.
Billy (James Pickett) lives on the countryside with his father (Charles Kissinger). Billy is not allowed to see females as "they're filthy and evil" and so on, you know what I mean if you've seen some of these films that have a religiously paranoid parents that torture their kids, like Brian De Palma's masterpiece Carrie (1976), for example. Soon a bunch of attractive females break their car and have to stay at the two men's apartment for the night, the father of course opposing very much. The night comes and so comes some gory murders. Soon Billy meets another girl whom he falls in love with. What follows is extremely slow situations, laughable dialogue, some absurd scenes and some more gratuitous gore at the end.
The film is very slow as I've mentioned couple of times already. It has painfully long scenes of the seventies disco/bar music that don't have ANY other purpose than to make the film run nearly 80 minutes so that it can be called a feature film. It has long scenes of Billy wandering around the town and thinking about something as well as running in the fields, showing cars drive away and so on and these scenes are as meaningless and boring as they sound. If all the "necessary" bits were cut out and put together again, the film would run approximately 50 minutes I think!
The dialogue and some of the situations will make most of the fans of trash laugh and enjoy. The film tries to offer some kind of an explanation for the acts the killer does but none of it makes sense. Why is the boy so stupid and weak he cannot do anything about it? And what kind of a "cannibalistic disease" actually is their mother suffering from?? Also this kind of a setting could give a good premise for some effective parody and black humor (like Hooper did with his Chain Saw Massacre two years later) but in the "Meathook", both the town and the countryside are depicted as equally apathetic, boring and also dangerous places to be and all the potential the film could have is not used.
The film includes also plenty of quite graphic nudity and gore so this is pure drive-in exploitation in its most honest form. The murders are pretty graphic and gory (and towards women only) so this can be considered as one of the earliest slasher films but far away from the most noteworthy ones. The "leg" scene at the end is pretty absurd to say the least and again makes me think how much better Hooper, for example, used the same potential and ideas.
The editing and cinematography is nothing special, the former being awfully bad especially at the end. Rarely have I seen such bad and confusing editing as in the gore finale of Three on a Meathook. Also the music by the director/writer himself is pretty bad and not interesting at all. The acting is as apathetic as the characters but fortunately the actors are not as near as bad as they could be and at least they found very attractive young females to act in the film to make at least something shine in the piece.
There are not many merits in this film other than those negative sides that turn positive in the eyes of the fans of trash. Three on a Meathook is the kind of film that don't get made anymore and so they have and will have their fans around the world and even though I'm a fan of low budget, grade z cinema, too, I still cannot give Three on a Meathook more than 2/10 as it just should have been much more than it now manages to be.
Billy (James Pickett) lives on the countryside with his father (Charles Kissinger). Billy is not allowed to see females as "they're filthy and evil" and so on, you know what I mean if you've seen some of these films that have a religiously paranoid parents that torture their kids, like Brian De Palma's masterpiece Carrie (1976), for example. Soon a bunch of attractive females break their car and have to stay at the two men's apartment for the night, the father of course opposing very much. The night comes and so comes some gory murders. Soon Billy meets another girl whom he falls in love with. What follows is extremely slow situations, laughable dialogue, some absurd scenes and some more gratuitous gore at the end.
The film is very slow as I've mentioned couple of times already. It has painfully long scenes of the seventies disco/bar music that don't have ANY other purpose than to make the film run nearly 80 minutes so that it can be called a feature film. It has long scenes of Billy wandering around the town and thinking about something as well as running in the fields, showing cars drive away and so on and these scenes are as meaningless and boring as they sound. If all the "necessary" bits were cut out and put together again, the film would run approximately 50 minutes I think!
The dialogue and some of the situations will make most of the fans of trash laugh and enjoy. The film tries to offer some kind of an explanation for the acts the killer does but none of it makes sense. Why is the boy so stupid and weak he cannot do anything about it? And what kind of a "cannibalistic disease" actually is their mother suffering from?? Also this kind of a setting could give a good premise for some effective parody and black humor (like Hooper did with his Chain Saw Massacre two years later) but in the "Meathook", both the town and the countryside are depicted as equally apathetic, boring and also dangerous places to be and all the potential the film could have is not used.
The film includes also plenty of quite graphic nudity and gore so this is pure drive-in exploitation in its most honest form. The murders are pretty graphic and gory (and towards women only) so this can be considered as one of the earliest slasher films but far away from the most noteworthy ones. The "leg" scene at the end is pretty absurd to say the least and again makes me think how much better Hooper, for example, used the same potential and ideas.
The editing and cinematography is nothing special, the former being awfully bad especially at the end. Rarely have I seen such bad and confusing editing as in the gore finale of Three on a Meathook. Also the music by the director/writer himself is pretty bad and not interesting at all. The acting is as apathetic as the characters but fortunately the actors are not as near as bad as they could be and at least they found very attractive young females to act in the film to make at least something shine in the piece.
There are not many merits in this film other than those negative sides that turn positive in the eyes of the fans of trash. Three on a Meathook is the kind of film that don't get made anymore and so they have and will have their fans around the world and even though I'm a fan of low budget, grade z cinema, too, I still cannot give Three on a Meathook more than 2/10 as it just should have been much more than it now manages to be.