Review by Stephanie Scaife.
Pieces (1982) is a cult classic exploitation slasher flick from Spanish filmmaker Juan Piquer Simon (Slugs, Monster Island) and here it is in a fantastic and lovingly created brand new edition from Arrow Video, sporting a vast array of special features and some rather eye catching newly commissioned art work.
The film starts off in 1942 with a young boy doing a jigsaw puzzle of a nude woman. His mother takes particular offence to the puzzle and smashes it up, and without so much of a thought as to the time and effort he may have put into solving it. Naturally the boy is upset by the irrational and hysterical actions of his mother, so he does what any young sociopath would do in this situation; he hacks her to death with an axe then cuts her up into little pieces with a saw.
Fast forward 40 years, and still tormented by his childhood memories, our killer goes on a mass murdering rampage of beautiful co-eds at a Boston university (although the film was entirely shot in Spain). It seems very much like he’s still got a chip on his shoulder about that jigsaw puzzle, as he hacks his victims to pieces in a bid to create his own puzzle by combining different parts of his victims’ bodies together. The tag line reads, “You don’t have to go to Texas for a chainsaw massacre!” meaning you could do just as well in Boston, I guess. So unsurprisingly our killer’s weapon of choice is the chainsaw, although he sometimes has to make do with a very sharp and pointy knife.
On the killers case is college student and lothario Kendall (Ian Serra), Police Lieutenant Bracken (Christopher George), and Mary (Lynda Day George) who poses as a tennis instructor to infiltrate the school and try and figure out the identity of the murderer. Meanwhile, girls are being killed in increasingly elaborate and unsubtle ways. But really the plot is somewhat irrelevant here; it’s all just filler between death scenes, one of the only things that this film manages to deliver, and in the process raising more than a few chuckles from me. My particular favourite being a surprisingly well shot murder sequence involving a water bed, a knife and a lot of flailing around. Although, somewhat unnervingly, I learnt afterwards that all the blood and gore in the film was supplied by a local abattoir and none of it was fake, adding a rather unpleasant ick factor to the whole thing.
Pieces is a fairly typical slasher film from this period; the plot is preposterous, the dialogue is poor and the dubbing even poorer, the victims are all semi-clad young women, and you can spot the killer a mile off. But for all that it is also fairly likeable in a sleazy sort of a way; if logic and storytelling is less important to you than boobs and bloody death scenes then there is a lot to admire here. The thing with Arrow Video is that it makes even its mediocre releases appealing with the inclusion of such lascivious art work and the sorts of special features that invite the nerdiest of nerd outs. With Pieces you get an introduction from Jack Taylor (who stars as one of the university professors in the film), a featurette about Taylor and his experiences making the movie, audio commentaries and a documentary about the legacy of Pieces called Pieces of Deconstruction: Looking Back at a Grindhouse Gorefest. So all in all it’s a fairly worthwhile investment for any horror fan.
For an alternate view on Pieces, please check out Editor-in-chief Marc Patterson’s review of the Grindhouse DVD release by clicking here.
Pieces is currently available on DVD.