Review #62: 'Pieces' (1982)

With a title such as Pieces, you know what to expect from an 80's horror film such as this. Low-budget, bad acting, cheesy dialogue, and lots of gore. On that front, the film truly delivers. The film is, though, as ugly and as badly put together as the grisly composition our killer here is creating. Starting with a small child piecing together a jigsaw puzzle of a naked woman, his mother arrives and goes mad, accusing her child of being perverted and twisted. This is obviously no ordinary child, as he commences butchering her with an axe. Forty years later, the pupils of a campus university start getting murdered in increasingly horrific ways as a madman with a chainsaw stalks the place. Lt. Bracken (the legendary Christopher George, who also appears in Fulci's City Of The Living Dead (1980)) is called in, and with the help of undercover agent Mary Riggs (Lynda Day George), and pupil Kendall James (Ian Sera), he starts to investigate the murders.

If I was to ask the majority people who the most bumbling police officer in cinema history is, I would expect to hear cries of Inspector Clouseau, Frank Drebin and the characters from Police Academy (1984). My vote would be for Lt. Bracken in Pieces. When beginning his investigation, Bracken strikes a deal with the dean of the university, who by normal means would be a suspect, not to tell anybody about the murders occurring. Why, oh why, would you fail to tell a campus of young students that a madman is wandering the premises and butchering everyone in his path? This just utterly bewildered me, and practically ruined the whole film. It is such a lazy and simplistic decision that is simply there to help progress the narrative, it renders the film utterly pointless.

On a positive note, the gore is wonderfully horrific. The first murder I was expecting a red herring, or one of those moments where a shadow creeps up to a girl, only for her to turn around suddenly and it to be her annoying boyfriend. Nope. He brutally chainsaws her head off, in broad daylight. Also, the films camerawork and mise-en-scene has a certain elegance that most giallo horrors do, and director Juan Piquer Simon is something of a cult legend, having directed crap-fest Jules Verne 'adaptations' Mystery On Monster Island (1981) and The Fabulous Journey To The Center Of The Earth (1978). It is just a pity the film ends on a cheap shock moment that jars with everything that came before. Overall a pretty crappy 80's horror with some enjoyable chainsaw massacring.


Directed by: Juan Piquer Simón
Starring: Christopher George, Ian Sera, Lynda Day George
Country: USA/Spain/Puerto Rico

Rating: **

Tom Gillespie