*THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS*
For this year’s mystery Celluloid Screams grindhouse screening, we were promised something equally as bonkers as the previous year’s Lady Terminator. I was also advised by someone on the CS programming team that I’d probably seen it, which somehow meant to fellow Screamers that I would be able to pluck the name of the film out of thin air because, after all, I’ve seen so little horror content over the years.
With not even a hint of what was about to come until the opening shot of the film was projected, the caption “Boston, 1942” triggered the 1980s genre cesspit area of my brain. Although the spectral gorehound on my shoulder was screaming “IT’S PIECES!,” I didn’t transfer this information to my longish-suffering seat grindhouse screening seat buddy, back for another year of me chortling inappropriately.
So, is Pieces as bonkers as Lady Terminator? In my opinion, not quite, but you’d have to go someone to be quite that bonkers and, to be fair, Pieces has more than its fair share of non sequiturs, clunky developments and thumpingly offensive plot wrinkles. Aficionados of the PG-13, come one, come all type of multiplex-friendly shocker might spend most of their time preventing their jaw from hitting the floor, whether it’s the thuddingly terrible dialogue, the gratuitous violence or what passes for the whodunit in this head scratcher from director Juan Piquer Simon, who went on to unleash Slugs. It’s produced by Dick Randall, who also gave us Don’t Open ‘Til Christmas. Given that information, you can probably guess the direction this will take.
Edmund Purdom, who went on to appear in – and partially direct – Don’t Open ‘Til Christmas is the Dean of a college where pretty young things are being hacked to bits by a chainsaw-wielding killer, whose endgame is to build a human jigsaw puzzle from the various body parts. Well, everyone’s got to have a hobby. On the trail of this madman is the quite frankly shite Lt. Frank Bracken (Christopher George) and his equally useless sidekick Sgt. Randy Holden (Frank Brana), reduced to enlisting the help of charisma-free sex pest Kendall James (Ian Sera), a student who knows his way around the campus and seems to be only too willing to play amateur sleuth and sleep around rather than, you know, do any actual coursework. He may already have had sealed his graduation in Being A Total Irritant but the story never tells you this.
Rounding out this low-wattage investigation team is Mary Riggs (Lynda Day, George’s real life wife of the time), ex-tennis pro turned ‘tec, going deep undercover as an instructor, hitting some backhands that don’t threaten Wimbledon qualification and somehow not slapping the cuffs on Kendall as the result of his creepy attention. It’s established early on that Kendall could not be the murderer, which is a shame because most audience members would point to him and say “Psycho sex maniac? You might as well take him down to the cop shop right now.”
There’s the usual list of suspects, including Paul Smith warming up for Crimewave as the shiftiest employee ever, managing to look suspicious even when passing the time of day and wandering the grounds with, surprise surprise, his trusty chainsaw. Jack Taylor, who showed up in more than a few Spanish horrors, plays a Professor who, it’s implied, clearly isn’t on the level because he happens to be gay. I mean, sheesh. This explanation, followed by a late in the day sort of backtrack to say that he’s okay really and he’s making more of it than he should, demonstrates just what a tone deaf attitude Pieces possesses in terms of inclusivity, even though it probably thinks, by its own twisted logic, that it’s breaking down barriers.
Pieces is not a good film. It’s not even an average one. The performances range from complete non-emoting to outright hysterical. The gore, although plentiful, is mainly unconvincing and looks cheap. The mystery provides almost no clues as to who the killer might be and hinges on two people looking through a series of files in the final act. It’s edited with, I suspect, the same chainsaw which features in some of the set-pieces. The score is a cut and paste job from various sources, featuring library pieces from, among others, Fabio Frizzi and also several cues from Carlo Maria Cordio’s work on Absurd from the previous year. Characters are tasked with delivering lines which have never featured in any actual conversation. There’s even some casual racism served up as a throwaway suspense sequence. Despite all of this, it somehow manages to be a hoot. Doubly so if you see it in a packed cinema at midnight.
Considering its propensity for chopping bits off women in gruesome close-up, it’s hardly a revelation that Pieces didn’t receive the video rental treatment in the 1980s, especially as the furore surrounding the Video Nasties was fuelled by particularly draconian treatment of horror titles, particularly slasher movies, and a general concern about imitative violence. Some sources refer to Pieces as appearing on the Section 3 list, but this is not the case. Had it shown up on tape, it would have been prime Section 2 fodder, would almost certainly have had its day in court and would almost certainly have caused a severe sense of humour failure among hard of thinking members of Parliament.
To be honest, if anyone were going to attempt to emulate Simon’s plodding kill sequences, the intended target would have legged it into the night well before the chainsaw had even spluttered into life. As ridiculous and patently fake as the slayings appear now, some folks forty years ago would have been asking whether or not people actually died during the production.
My feeling about Pieces is that, for all of its potentially offensive content, it’s carried off with such a breathtaking level of ineptitude that, other than a few snippets of dialogue which will make you want to cringe yourself inside out, renders the whole thing silly rather than troubling. It also off proceedings with a scene in which the killer takes so long to attempt to bump someone off that the forces of law and order can drive all the way across town to the building, faff around with a door and then climb several flights of stairs to carry out a last minute save. If you think matters have reached peak stupidity, brace yourselves, because there’s a closing shock which scores points from coming out of nowhere but then instantly loses all of those points and then some because it makes absolutely no bloody sense whatsoever.
The Spanish title for this is Mil gritos tiene la noche, which translates to The Night Has A Thousand Screams. Genre fans may be screaming but it’ll be with laughter. Clod-hoppingly staged and remarkable for its ability to generate no tension whatsoever, this makes Slugs look like a masterpiece and ultimately it’s memorable only for Lynda Day’s amazing work when it comes to repeatedly screaming the word “Bastard!.” Catnip for bad movie connoisseurs, cat shit for almost everyone else.