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

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.

Titles like this don't come along everyday.Sadly, the title is about the most appealing part if this little 70's oddity.<Spoilers>'Based on the true story of Ed Gein' (someone should really copyright that), it tells the tale of a young man who is accused of doing terrible things by his domineering father, or did he?The main problem with this film is the pacing. Despite its 80 minute run time there is an incredible amount of filler and very little action. The opening quadruple murder flashes by in a .. er .. flash yet a scene featuring characters walking through a field goes on for an age. The worst example however is a scene in which our protagonist goes to a bar to think. While he sits in meditation we are treated to TWO FULL SONGS by the bar band!The whole love interest sub plot does little to enhance the plot and just gives the excuse for more filler.Some credit must be given for the ludicrous ending. Part of the twist is patently guessable though the extra little family secret makes for an amusing surprise.If you're really into your Ed Gein films check out Deranged instead.