I don’t get this one. It’s a Spanish made trash-fest from 1982, produced and co-written by American schlockmeister Dick Randall (THE YIN AND THE YANG OF THE MR. GO, DON’T OPEN TILL CHRISTMAS), and directed by the Spanish exploitation movie veteran Juan Piquer Simon (SLUGS). The film’s American release had a great ad campaign (“You Don’t Have to Go to Texas For A Chainsaw Massacre!”) that did nothing to alleviate its poor reception, yet now people have inexplicably decided PIECES is a neglected classic. An example would be the late Chas. Balun, who in his 1995 book MORE GORE SCORE dismissed the film (correctly) as “bloody awful (heavy accent on the former)” only to provide fawning linear notes for the 2016 Grindhouse Releasing DVD.
The film opens with a young boy putting together an R-rated naked lady jigsaw puzzle, for which he’s reprimanded by his bitchy mother. Apparently upset at being interrupted, the kid chops his ma up with an axe and then blames the killing on a random maniac.
Forty years later a series of murders occur at a local college, all accomplished via chainsaw. The culprit is the now grown-up boy from the early scenes, who (as shown by copious intercuts) is putting together a puzzle of human body parts a la the naked lady jigsaw puzzle seen earlier–yet we never get a glimpse of this person’s face. The imposing groundskeeper Willard (Paul Smith) would appear to be the most viable suspect, but there are a number of others, including a nerdy student named Kendall (Ian Sera) who’s seen running from the scene of a swimming pool murder, and an overenthusiastic “Kung-Fu instructor” (Bruce Le, who headlined many a “Brucespolitation” programmer for producer Dick Randall).
Enter the steely Lt. Bracken (Christopher George), who’s been charged with investigating the killings. Upon finding a discarded chainsaw near the pool, Bracken asks a professor “Could that have happened with a chainsaw like that one over there?” The answer, as you might guess, is yes.
Enter Mary (Lynda Day—later Lynda Day George), a tennis instructor-turned-cop who goes undercover as, appropriately, a tennis instructor. Bracken’s primary suspicion falls upon the college’s dean (Edmund Purdom) after an investigation into the man’s past, which is quite suspicious, but when Mary makes the mistake of paying him a visit the dean, upon catching a glimpse of her feet, drugs her, as feet are what’s needed to complete his human jigsaw puzzle.
A raucous audience reaction track from a 2002 revival screening, included on the PIECES DVD, suggests that the film works best as unintentional comedy. The ultra-hammy line readings by Christopher George and his future wife Lynda accentuate the silliness, as do the frequent cuts to the naked woman jigsaw puzzle being put together (which is what passes for psychology).
The film doesn’t work as a suspense thriller, as it’s too ridiculous, nor as a whodunnit, as the filmmakers clearly weren’t too interested in who the killer might be (and nor is the viewer). Juan Piquer Simon may be an exploitation movie legend in some circles, but he was frankly never much of a director, as evidenced by the lackluster helming on display.
This leaves the one area in which PIECES does compel interest: its bloodletting quotient. It’s easily one of the goriest entries in the splatter movie cycle of the early 1980s, with depictions of numerous limbs lopped off and multiple beheadings that (to get back to MORE GORE SCORE) earned the film a 10 on the Gore Score (which “concerns itself with nothing but the quantity of blood, brains, guts, slime, snot, spunk, puke or other assorted precious bodily fluids spilled, slopped or splattered during the course of the film”). If those things were enough to make for a quality product PIECES would indeed be the masterpiece it’s been proclaimed, but they aren’t and it’s not.
Vital Statistics
PIECES
Almena Film Production
Director: Juan Piquer Simon
Producer: Dick Randall, Steve Minasian
Screenplay: Dick Randall, “John Shadow” (Roberto Loyola)
Cinematography: “John Marine” (Juan Mariné)
Editing: Antonio Gimeno
Cast: Christopher George, Paul Smith, Frank Brana, Edmund Purdom, “Linda Day” (Linda Day George), Ian Sera, Jack Taylor, Gerard Tichy, May Heatherly, Hilda Fuchs, Roxana Nieto, Cristina Cottrel, Leticia Marfil, Silvia Gambino, Carmen Aguado, Bruce Le