Entry 105: Pieces (1982)

Pieces (1982)

Dir: Juan Piquer Simon

"You don't have to go to Texas for a chainsaw massacre! Pieces...It's exactly what you think it is!"

   

I'll admit that I'm glad to be done watching porno movies for awhile, but that doesn't mean I'm not going to wallow in degenerate sleaze!  Join me in the Basement as I spend a little time with the INSANE Spanish horror flick Pieces!

In a 1942-set, Halloween inspired cold opening, a woman overreacts by threatening to burn all of her son's belongings when she catches him putting together a jigsaw puzzle of a naked woman.  When she also threatens to kill him (!?) if she catches him with porn again, he takes "get them before they get you" to heart and messily offs her with an axe before hacking her body to pieces with a handsaw.  40 years later, the now grown-up psycho is up to his old tricks, this time mutilating nubile young coeds on a college campus with a chainsaw.  But who is the killer?  Is it the slightly sinister Eurotrash Dean of Students (Edmund Purdom, Don't Open Til Christmas, Nightmare City), the cartoonishly sinister groundskeeper Willard (Paul Smith, Midnight Express, Dune), rapey anatomy professor Brown (Jack Taylor, Autopsy, Conan the Barbarian)?  That's what put-upon cop Bracken (the late, great Christopher George, Grizzly, Enter the Ninja) is tasked with discovering.  As the body count rises, Bracken, in a crackerjack bit of policework, deputizes honor roll student/manwhore (seriously, he seems to be fucking every girl on campus!) Kendall (Simon regular Ian Sera), putting him DIRECTLY in harms way.  In a bit of character development worthy of an '80's G.I. Joe filecard, Bracken also gets help from Mary Riggs (George's real-life wife Lynda Day, Day of the Animals, Mortuary), a professional tennis champ who grew bored with competing and decided to become an undercover cop!  The films ends with Purdom revealed as the killer as he takes Mary hostage...can Bracken and Kendall get to her in time?

Holy.  SHIT.  Words cannot express the sheer joy and happiness that swelled up in me while watching Pieces!  Where to start?  It's filled with overwrought performances (Smith's mugging is worth the 86 minutes of your time this film will take up alone!), BAFFLING character choices and plot developments the will make you doubt your sanity (Bracken deliberately putting a student in harm's way, Day's entire character...and how, exactly, did the midwestern kid from the prologue grow up to become VERY British Purdom?)...Jesus, did I mention that Day gets attacked by a KUNG FU FIGHTING NINJA out of FUCKING NOWHERE?  Yes, he's explained away by Kendall as the school's martial arts instructor before making a pricelessly non-PC joke about "eating bad chop suey!" in cartoonish broken English before disappearing from the film forever.  It's gory as hell, with plenty of severed limbs and decapitations done explicitly in-frame (the film was released unrated) and features plentiful female AND male full-frontal nudity (Sera's enormous wang should receive it's own credit)...something for everybody!  Oh yeah, it also features perhaps the finest "what the actual fuck?" twist ending in all of slasherdom.  For fuck's sake, seek this one out!