Pieces (1983)

I remember well when Pieces hit theatres Stateside. This was during my thoroughly moronic phase of indiscriminate devotion to slasher and gore films, when such productions were a dime a dozen in the early 1980s following the phenomenal success of Halloween and Friday the 13th.

Every Friday night, long-suffering friend Hussein and I would scour the Boston Phoenix (the Boston Globe generally didn’t bother listing trashy horror films), looking for the latest cinematic bloodbath playing somewhere in town. More often than not, there would be some dubious hack-fest showing at our local Sacks cinema, and off we’d go in eager anticipation.

Unfortunately, we had been suffering a particularly poor run of luck. More than once, I either fell asleep or simply walked out before the end credits rolled. Usually, Hussein and I made up half the audience anyway, as titles such as The House on Sorority Row, Nightmares, Nightmares in a Damaged Brain, Silent Night, Deadly Night, Blood Beach and Just Before Dawn were hardly packing theatres. The writing was already on the wall. The great horror boom had begun to run out of steam. All that bloodletting had produced a severe case of anaemia, and fresh ideas had all but dried up.

All that remained were endless clones of the handful of films that had struck gold.

The genre became little more than a production line, churning out one interchangeable slasher after another, all relying on point-of-view Steadicam shots in imitation of Halloween. Worse still, many producers seemed convinced that it was elaborate gore rather than suspense that had terrified audiences in the first place. We were treated to an endless parade of increasingly inventive death scenes stitched together with the barest excuse for a plot, yet none of these films came remotely close to matching the nerve-shredding tension of the movies they were trying so desperately to imitate—John Carpenter’s Halloween, Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, The Omen with its wonderfully inventive death scenes and, finally, Friday the 13th, itself an enormously successful, if rather shameless, borrowing from Carpenter’s masterpiece.

Pieces arrived with a strong Spanish pedigree despite being largely shot around Boston with an American cast. I distinctly remember seeing the wonderfully lurid poster and immediately thinking, in my usual cynical fashion, that the film must be absolutely dreadful if the producers had resorted to plastering “No One Under 17 Will Be Admitted…” across the artwork in enormous letters.

Even the world’s biggest sucker for horror trash wasn’t fooled this time.

For perhaps the only occasion in my life, I deliberately gave a slasher movie a miss during its original theatrical run. I felt rather pleased with myself for saving both my money and my sanity, and everything I subsequently read about the film seemed to confirm I’d made the right decision.

Still, curiosity has a habit of gnawing away at one.

For the next twenty years, I couldn’t quite shake the feeling that perhaps I’d overlooked some forgotten masterpiece. So when Pieces finally appeared on DVD as part of a four-film “Blood Bath” collection for the princely sum of $6.99, I finally gave in.

Strangely enough, for a film that acquired such notoriety over the years, it never even found its way onto Britain’s infamous Video Nasties list, which rather suggested that much of its fearsome reputation had been carefully manufactured by the producers themselves.

Watching it at last, some twenty years later, I found myself quietly congratulating my younger self.

I had got it absolutely right.

Pieces is an outright dud with precious little to recommend it.

The plot is typical Euro-slasher nonsense. A sexually curious ten-year-old boy is discovered by his mother assembling a jigsaw puzzle of a nude woman. Mother understandably overreacts, whereupon Junior buries an axe in her, chops her into conveniently manageable pieces and hides the evidence before climbing into a wardrobe to sob theatrically over the woman he has just dismembered.

From there, the action jumps to a gloomy Massachusetts college campus where attractive young women begin disappearing one by one beneath the chainsaw of a heavily breathing figure dressed entirely in black. Between murders, our mystery killer returns home to continue assembling both his nude jigsaw puzzle and a rather more substantial collection of human body parts.

The local police, naturally hopeless, plant an undercover tennis instructor on campus, and before long, the usual procession of severed limbs, shrieking victims and red herrings follows.

The gore effects certainly spill plenty of blood, but they never approach the artistry of Tom Savini’s work in The Prowler. Instead, they simply look messy, amateurish and faintly unpleasant. Worse still, beyond the occasional splatter, there isn’t a single surprise to be found. The film lumbers from one predictable murder to the next before arriving at a finale that is less shocking than unintentionally hilarious.

The acting is exactly what one would expect from low-budget Euro-horror of this vintage, while director Juan Piquer Simón displays little evidence of style in either his camerawork or staging. There isn’t an ounce of suspense to be found anywhere. One simply waits for the next victim to be dispatched before checking the watch yet again.

Paul Smith—best remembered as the terrifying prison guard in Midnight Express—turns up as a chainsaw-wielding gardener who is so obviously intended as a red herring that one almost feels sorry for him.

In the end, Pieces offers none of the style, wit or accidental charm that occasionally redeems the better examples of Euro-horror. It possesses no atmosphere, no tension and not the slightest trace of humour, intentional or otherwise.

It is simply one enormous hunk of shite.

Woefully inept, relentlessly predictable and almost terminally dull, Pieces ranks amongst the weakest products of the entire post-Halloween slasher boom—and considering the competition, that really is saying something.