Pieces (1983)

It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

Yes, absolutely, there is fun to be had, as well as many, many things to go boom, all amid an atmospheric urban jungle.

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

This movie is the best kind of hot mess cult classic. It has such an amazing juxtaposition of completely absurd, out-of-place dialogue, mediocre acting, and subpar dubbing along with some truly chilling moments and AWESOME murders that you can't help but love it.The movie opens with a young boy being caught and subsequently berated by his mother for playing with a pornographic puzzle (I had no idea such a thing existed so thank you for that). But don't worry, he kills her with an axe and then feigns innocence when the police arrive so he is sent off to live with his aunt. Fast forward 40 years and his lust for killing is still there, only now he stalks college co-eds and keeps pieces of their bodies to assemble his own perfect woman (I'm really not sure what his end goal is there).It's a pretty straight forward slasher/mystery, but the red herrings that are thrown at you are just laughably obvious. Like I'm really going to believe that the sketchy gardener who has keys to everything on campus (Paul L. Smith) is the actual killer? Or the anatomy professor (Jack Taylor, though I wish it could have been Thomas Lennon aka Lieutenant Dangle from Reno 911) who is clearly socially stunted and has working knowledge of how to disassemble a body? But it doesn't matter because this movie is FUN.You have these moments of legitimately high tension — like the killer following the girl as she unsuspectingly dances down the hallway and then trapping her in the elevator — and then, shortly after, probably the best known moment of ridiculousness when a completely random dude jumps out of the bushes and scares Kendall (Ian Sera) as he is investigating with some pretty sweet kung fu moves.There's god awful acting and some of the cheesiest, stiffest lines ever… but you have brilliant killings like the female reporter being slashed on the water bed and then flailing in the bloody water in slow motion before he stabs her through the back of the head (but, naturally, you can see the fake knife bend in the most obvious way in the pulled back shot). Or the girl with her legs chainsawed off in the corner of locker room (definitely one of the most brutal scenes I've witnessed).I thought the music (done by Stelvio Cipriani and Carlo Maria Cordio) was a standout, too, though some moments were eerily reminiscent of The Blood Stained Shadow, which Cipriani also scored.But the TRUE gem of this movie is the ending. Not only do we have the very obvious twist when we find out the killer, but the last two bits of surprise are just THE BEST. I was already loving it but with the closing scene I was LITERALLY clapping at the TV as the credits rolled. Worth it for that alone, trust me.

Written by Joe D'Amato and directed by Juan Piquer Simon, PIECES is one of the shoddiest yet most perversely entertaining trash movies out there. Packed with grisly gore sequences of people being chainsawed to bits, appallingly dubbed, and with a great exploitation cast, this is truly a one-off experience the like of which had never been seen before - or since - this film was made. This unlikely Spanish/US co-production, which would have us believe the action all takes place in Boston, kicks off in firm NIGHTMARES IN A DAMAGED BRAIN territory with the gruesome scene of a young boy axing his mother to death.Years later, "beautiful" American teenagers are being murdered by a man with a chainsaw at a university campus. The killer is decked out in the classic giallo garb: hat, gloves, long black coat, and chainsaw tucked behind his back - you name it. We see shots of him piecing together the jigsaw puzzle of a naked woman throughout the film yet his identity is supposedly hidden as D'Amato strives for a whodunit element to the plot. The "plot" then lurches from one shoddy but graphic chainsaw murder to the next, wallowing in graphic carnage as naked girls have their arms and heads cut off and are sawed in two, with cheap blood splattering the walls and surrounding sets - gorehounds certainly get their money's worth here.The unlikely 'hero' of the film is geeky college student Kendall, as played by Spanish nobody Ian Sera without an ounce of charisma or intelligence - he's just a hilariously dumb nerdish guy, drafted in to help with the police investigation for no apparent reason! You've gotta love the extra scenes like some kung fu and a girl rollerskating into a pane of glass which are there for padding and have no relation to the story in any way. The dialogue is funny and dumb throughout, typical for the era.The cast is a mix of American and Spanish actors, none really familiar unless you're a fan of US and Spanish cult movies from the past twenty years. First up is Christopher George playing a hard-nose police lieutenant who is even less successful at catching the criminal here than he was in THE EXTERMINATOR! His wife (nepotism perhaps?) Lynda Day George pops up as the pretty-but-ageing blonde heroine who predictably gets stalked by the killer in the final stages and has a great melodramatic outburst scene. Edmund Purdom is wonderfully hammy whilst the menacing Paul Smith is wasted in a red herring role as the janitor! As for the Spanish cast, Frank Brana plays it like John Saxon as a hard-knuckle police sergeant whilst horror stalwarts Jack Taylor and Gerard Tichy prop up the supporting teacher roles. Worth sitting through to witness the out-of-left-field finale which sees the assembled corpse suddenly springing to life in a supernatural twist - yes, it had me cheering!

You probably know, right from the beginning, if this is the sort of movie you might like or not. This is a movie that requires a certain penchant for candy apple blood, ridiculous murders and even more ridiculous plot lines. DO NOT got into this just for the gore. If you are an admitted gorehound and that's all you are interested in, you will appreciate the murders, but probably come away wondering why you just spent 90 minutes on this movie.Essentially, an American attempt to make a giallo film. It has all of the bad trademarks of that style with very few of the good things. We get a black-glove killer and a lame mystery whodunit as we try to determine which character is the killer. We get plenty of bad dialog from people speaking like no one you've ever met in real life. It's full of ludicrous plot points. A tennis champion spends her days working as a secretary in a police office (because they don't have sponsors or training to do or anything like that). She volunteers to go undercover in an attempt to capture the killer. The officer in charge worries for her safety, though, so rather than put a few uniforms to watch over her, he enlists a college kid who was a suspect five minutes ago. The college kid gets more and more involved until they've basically done all but give him a badge. All of this is only really necessary to set up one final shock in the movie.The giallo style is mixed quite heavily with sleazy exploitation horror. It wants very badly to feel like a "dirty movie" and I don't necessarily mean pornographic, but it wants to capture that MANIAC feeling where the viewer walks away unclean from having viewed something nasty. It never really figures out how to accomplish that, though. Plenty of reviews will focus on the nudity and the gore. I didn't find much more nudity than you would see in any number 0f 80s horrors. As for the gore, there is plenty of it. While no DEAD ALIVE, each murder shows the director gleefully spraying the red stuff all over the scene.It's a bad movie, but there's something really amusing about it. I hate to use the "so bad it's good" because most bad movies are just bad. However, the silly plot and characters, the bad attempts at humor and the memorable murders all add up to make this at least memorable, if not really good.

Here's a bloody, and I mean bloody chainsaw flick, this makes the Texas Chainsaw look like pumped versions of The Sound of Music. Take the warning on the front cover seriously before watching the dispatches of torso's whatever that follow. A little boy caught by his mother with a nude jigsaw becomes killer, ending her in just the start of the carnage that follows. Cut many many years later, to the eighties on a school campus, we have a nut, with a chainsaw, cutting his way through nubile bodies to create his own human jigsaw. Siuck f..k. Christopher George, a detective on the case, sends a woman, undercover, who's trained in Karate to catch this madman, where it's not easy. We have one suspect, Midnight Express's Paul Smith as a caretaker, bearing a chainsaw. Could he be the one. A student on campus helps George, in his investigation, going through mugsheets, whatever. This bright intellectual really has his work cut out for him, where he thinks this work is kind of cool. Meanwhile, the chainsaw nut out there is still making the cut. One girl literally wets herself in terror while getting it in the elevator. As an Italian cheapie classic, Pieces is one horror fan's guilty pleasure, with a not so happy ending for an innocent party. If you want blood and hot bodies, don't pass this one up. I'd option for this over the Texas Chainsaw Massacres anyday. The Asian jogger who went to attack our undercover hottie, who outwits him, then takes off again as though everything's cool. What the hell was that about.