The Meatrack (1970) User Reviews

Kind of dull but interesting

[preppy-3 · 5/10 · 30 June 2007]

J.C. (David Calder) is a bisexual hustler in New York City. He'll do anything for money--but won't let love or emotion in. We find out why by flashbacks to his childhood where his mother lectured him that money was everything. Then he one day saves Jean (Donna Troy) from being beaten. They fall in love and decide to move...but can J.C. truly leave his past behind? It all leads to a negative ending.

This was shot in the late 60s ("Where Eagles Dare" is playing and that came out in 1968) but it looks like a 1970s movie. There's tons of nudity and quite a lot of male frontal. There are a few sex scenes that approach hard core and a very negative, depressing nature. This might be hard to watch but the terrible direction detracts as does the lousy acting. Calder is tall, handsome, muscular and has a nice body (and went on to a long career) but he's a terrible actor. Still he looks great nude and that's all that matters here. Troy actually seems pretty good but she's hardly in the movie.

In a way this is a time capsule of Times Square in NYC in the late 1960s but it's negative tone and bad acting make it a chore to sit through. Also it's surprisingly dull despite all the nudity and sex. I give this a 5 and that's mostly because of Calder's body.

Hmmm...What Can I say?

[BrettErikJohnson · 2/10 · 14 May 2002]

Well, this is yet another one of those sexploitation films of the '60s & '70s. What sets this one slightly apart from the rest is that it centers around a bisexual street hustler. As you can probably guess, there isn't much in the way of a plot or character development. The hustler hooks up with some gay guys. He saves a young woman from being raped by an old man who was photographing her in the nude. In the strangest scene, the hustler is in a hotel room with the young woman he saved. All of a sudden a couple of drag queens burst in and force them at knifepoint to make a stag film right then and there. It all may sound kind of interesting in a bizarre way but I found it to be rather dull. 2/10

Scuzzy, leering portrait of a young bisexual hustler.

[EyeAskance · 22 March 2006]

J. C. is a loner with a boner, a drifter who arrives in metropolitan San Francisco to flit about from man to man to woman to man...etc. His virile young body his only means of survival, this creature of the street boffs an assemblage of sluts, perverts, and letches for pay while intermittently flashing back to the sad days of his childhood...a time when his scumbag father and harlot mother played around on each other, leaving the poor boy to observe from the shadows.

Lurid sexploitation is deficiently nouvelle vague in exposition, but for all its specious arthouse ambitions, it's grindhouse fodder, full stop. It's dreary, uneventful, and centered on an exanimate character who's little more than a zombified screwing machine. THE MEATRACK is a trashy little libido spur from a time in America when the gay community lived by its own rules, and as such should be a hell of a lot more interesting, and at least a little bit more shocking.

3.5/10...just another piece of meat.

"Im a hustler I hustle,you can tell that I'm paid."

[morrison-dylan-fan · 7/10 · 29 September 2012]

Being disappointed by the first (and longest) feature (Sticks and Stones) on an Odeon Entertainment double bill of Queer Cinema DVD,I tepidly decided to pick the second,and shortest movie off the rack.

The plot:

Trying to get away from his troubled childhood,J.C. becomes a drifter,who makes what little money he has by being a Bi-sexual male prostitute.Since having accepted the fact that he may possibly be a loner for the rest of his life,J.C''s drifting life is torn apart,when he catches a photography trying to rape a model,which leads to J.C getting hold of a stone and "hammering" the photography until he is dead.

View on the film:

Although the film does feature a number of naked men and women,director Richard Stockton goes for an impressively experimental approach ,which helps to make the aimless life of J.C. be as much central to the movie as the "skin".Using a mix of washed out colour and worn down black & white footage to fully show the murky,grubby world that J.C inhabits,Stockton also uses a number of well placed,chilling flashbacks to show the permanent psychological damage that J.C's parents have done to him.For the screenplay of this trim 64 minute movie,writer Joel Ensana uses J.C's (played with a great dead behind the eyes by David Calder) killing of the photography as a lock to J.C. having no chance at all of a "happy ending",with a final,grim twist being a tough,almost Film Noir downer punch,which guarantees that J.C will be unable to ever get away from his damaged past,or from being an aimlessly moving drifter.

Gloriously sordid slice-of-life early 70's sleaze gem

[Woodyanders · 8/10 · 25 April 2009]

Surly sadsack J.C. (dolefully portrayed by mopey, muscular slab of beefcake David Calder), a lonely, laconic, emotionally void bisexual drifter with a deep-seated dread of commitment, ekes out a meager existence sexually servicing both men and women alike. J.C. ambles into a major city and soon becomes the favorite boy toy of several desperate libidinous homosexuals. Things briefly perk up when J.C. befriends sassy, warm-hearted fellow itinerant Jean (the cute, ingratiating Donna Troy), but naturally hilariously contrived tragedy intervenes when two nasty, swishy and catty knife-wielding transvestites force J.C. and Jean to participate in an impromptu stag film (!) and J.C. just can't give up his body-pimping ways, which leads to a seriously depressing bummer ending.

Director/photographer Richard Stockton and screenwriter Joel Ensana lay on the slimy, seamy, sewer-level sensationalism by the trowel, appealing to the viewer's baser instincts with such always effective and absorbing nickel'n'dime trash flick reliables as harsh, grainy cinematography which alternates between washed-out color and stark black and white with an equal lack of polish, ample nudity (mostly male, with a light sprinkling of undraped distaff skin as well), raw'n'raunchy dialogue, a constantly bleak and nihilistic down-at-the-heals tone, numerous graphic and torrid carnal escapades, a spare, bluesy score, a resolutely rancid supporting cast of somewhat distressfully credible (and hideously homely) gutter-sniping scumballs, authentically seedy locations (rathole apartments, dingy low-rent theaters, tawdry magazine newsstands and adult bookstores, grimy gay bathhouses), and, most importantly, deliciously overripe melodramatic kitchen sink-style plotting (J.C.'s dismal lot in life is explained in a series of lovably rinky-dink soft-focus flashbacks by his miserable childhood and the gross mistreatment he endured from his shrill, pettish mother and adulterous sleazoid father). Grim, grubby, and wholly lacking in any wholesome, respectable and redeemable attributes (rampant amorality is an often surefire sign of superior schlock), "The Meatrack" overall rates highly as a perfectly putrid little winner.