Ketrivie It isn't all that great, actually. Really cheesy and very predicable of how certain scenes are gonna turn play out. However, I guess that's the charm of it all, because I would consider this one of my guilty pleasures.

StyleSk8r At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

Iseerphia All that we are seeing on the screen is happening with real people, real action sequences in the background, forcing the eye to watch as if we were there.

Helllins It is both painfully honest and laugh-out-loud funny at the same time.

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.

trashgang What's in a name, the title of this flick is never represented in the movie. Okay, there is one shot, maybe 5 seconds were you can see, euh, 4 girls on a meathook. Anyway, a title like that attracted the real geeks out there. So this movie became a cult favorite. But it never had a proper release. The only way to catch it is on VHS and even they are rare. What we have here is an OOP, oh yes, I know, there are some DVD releases, also OOP, but they were just rip offs of the VHS. That is what I have, a DVD release. What makes it unique is that it is signed by Linda Thompson. The blond one who's naked all the time and get killed earlier in the movie. So far I never found one on the Net signed. Enough of my pride. The movie itself, is really a grindhouse release. Due the fact that it was an US release we all know what that means, NTSC format. And being in the business we all know what that means here in Europe, Never The Same Color. Indeed, when they cut from on shot to another then yellow rules and next shot green appears as the main color. Oh yeah, never been colorized afterwards. So it's low budget. But the editing is okay, the score is okay, lipsync is sometimes a problem but the quality of the film they used is terrible. There are a lot of drops and scratches on it. But that makes it more and more grindhouse. The only failure the movie has is that it was advertised as based on the life of Ed Gein. No way it does. It starts of pretty well, you are only 10 seconds in the movie and Linda, who signed my DVD, yeah yeah, already appears in a T&A shot. No problems the first 20 minutes. You know the story, 4 birds go for a hike in the weekend, car breaks down, a guy passes by and take them to his place. Father isn't happy with girls in the house so they all die. The effects used are cheap but they used the red stuff very good. It never is gory but it works, watch the decapitation how they edited that. It works. But after 20 minutes the movie falls down, becomes slow and is nothing more than a love story. At the last 15 minutes the blood flows again. If they only had used the other 50 minutes to do something with it. Again, it never bored me due the grindhouse/ drive in style. It has a lot of gratuitous nudity, 70 style so full bush, anyway. If you come up to a copy of it don't hesitate to hook on it but you must have a grindhouse feeling.

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.

Michael_Elliott Three on a Meathook (1972) ** 1/2 (out of 4) William Girdler directed this horror film, which is another variation of the Ed Gein story. Four girls go camping but their car breaks down. Thankfully a young man named Billy comes by and offers them a chance to spend the night at his house along with his father. To say any more would ruin a few surprises the film has to offer. This low budget film was clearly influenced by Psycho and offers a couple nice homages to the Hitchcock film. However, it's also rather clear that this film influenced two future Gein based films, Deranged and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. For the most part the film works fine with some nice direction and a couple good performance but even at 80-minutes this thing drags in certain spots. It seems the movie would have only ran fifty-minutes but there are several scenes that just drag on for no reason.