Rant #2,238: Lazy Day

After a couple of really busy days--as you know, I had to take off Friday from work because of various things that were clearly out of my control--I finally had a day to really chill out on Sunday.

This was probably the first day that I had to "do absolutely nothing" since my family and I arrived home from our vacation about a month ago.

I fully appreciated it, let me tell you.

Oh, it isn't as if I stayed in bed all day--I did have some things to do, such as the laundry and transporting my son back and forth to work--but otherwise, it was really the lazy day I had been looking for, a day just to do not much of anything and simply relax.

So what did I do? I watched two movies and a classic TV show to fill up my time.

I could care less about football, I am burned out from baseball, and the basketball season is almost ready to start, so it was the perfect Sunday to get engaged in some "distaff" programming.

One movie I am not going to talk about, because I had previously watched the first third of the film, and prior to Sunday, I never had time to pick it up and watch the rest. It was so bad that really, it doesn't pay to comment on.

But the second film, which I watched in its entirety yesterday, kind of enthralled me while it kind of repulsed me at the same time.

Quite frankly, it was one of those films that was so bad, that it was good, and certainly a great way to kill less than 90 minutes of my time.

"Three on a Meathook" was a film from 1973 that has such an enthralling name that I simply had to check it out.

Written and directed by William Girdler, the movie concerns a father and son who live on a farm somewhere in the boondocks. The son's mother passed on years ago, so it just the two of them who live on the farm, where the father--who has become a bitter alcoholic--has become an expert cook, making meat dishes with unique taste.

The son, played by James Pickett, is subservient to the father, played by Charles Kissinger, and is led to believe by his father that not only can't he handle women, he can't handle them to the point that every woman he meets, he ends up murdering and dismembering.

This includes four young ladies whose car gets stuck in the middle of nowhere, and who are rescued by the son, who invites them over to the farm for the evening so they can call to get the car fixed the next morning.

The girls take him up on his offer, and they go with the son to the farm. There, they meet up with the son's dad, who doesn't want the women to be staying the night because, as he tells the son, "you know how you are with women."

One thing leads to another, and the four women are murdered, one decapitated in what is the film's true "money shot."

The son had slept in the barn with the women taking up all the available open bedrooms, so when he wakes up, the father tells the son that once again, he is going to have to clean up the mess brought on by the son's tendencies against women. He tells the son to make himself scarce for the day while he cleans up this mess.

The son denies doing what his father said he has done, as he always has, and leaves for the "big city," where he drinks himself into a stupor at a bar, and where he meets a kind waitress who, of course, takes him to her apartment so he can dry out.

The son and the waitress end up getting pretty chummy, and the son invites the woman to his farm, where she eventually arrives with a girlfriend in tow.

The son and the waitress get even more chummy, but the waitress' friend meets the same fate as many women have there, gored with a pick and left for dead.

The waitress looks for her friend, can't find her, and lo and behold, stumbles on three women on meathooks in one of the farm's barns.

The climax is that the father has actually been committing the murders all along, to feed into the needs of his wife, who not only didn't die, but has survived on her cannibalistic tendencies--the girls that have been killed have become the food she has survived with--and the meat he has cooked with.

The father is apprehended, and at the end of the movie, we get a long speech from a psychiatrist about how the son's father simply snapped, the son was innocent of any wrongdoing, and the father will spend the rest of his life in a straitjacket in a mental health ward.

And yes, the young waitress has stood by the son, and is with the son when he hears the fate of his father from the psychiatrist.

In spite of what you might think, this very low-budget film does have its virtues, and it is engaging to a certain extent.

It has all the typical early 1970s horror film virtues--which means lots of blood and gore and lots of female nudity--and it also features future Elvis Presley beau Linda Thompson in a small role as one of the girls who gets it.

And better yet, the film is very loosely based on the troubled story of real-life serial killer Ed Gein, who killed many people in rural Wisconsin over a number of years and fashioned their skin and bones as keepsakes.

I moved from that film to something way more light and breezy and funny, the classic TV sitcom "Car 54, Where Are You?" I watched one episode of the show--its first episode--and once I heard the classic theme song--"There's a holdup in the Bronx ... "--I was brought back to a different time and place, and I laughed, laughed again, and laughed some more during the episode's less than 30 minute run.

In this episode, New York City police officers Gunther Toody, played by Joe E. Ross, and Francis Muldoon, played by Fred Gwynne, want to take off from work at their Bronx precinct to go deep sea fishing.

What they have to do to get the chance to do this is where the fun lies, and without going into that much detail, they have to rework the schedule so every officer in the Bronx precinct gets involved in switching days to cater to Toody and Muldoon's day off.

The show is so well done--and features an incredible diverse cast of classic character actors in pivotal roles--and it makes this sitcom from the early 1960s the classic that it is.

Just seeing the likes of Nipsey Russell trying to keep the schedule board up to date is enough to literally floor me, and that it did.

What a funny, funny show that was, and still is. Sitcom creators of today would do themselves a favor by studying this show and basing their own creations on what is funny, because today's TV sitcoms are anything but funny.

And "Car 54, Where Are You?" continues to be funny, more than 50 years after the fact.

So that is what I did on my lazy Sunday, and I wish I can have many more lazy Sundays in the future to do just about the same thing.