PIECES

Directed by Juan Piquer Simón. 1982. Spain, United States.

"It’s exactly what you think it is."

That right there is the best possible tagline they could have chosen for this wacky sack of tropes and cliches. Talk about truth in advertising. PIECES is unmitigated slasher chaos, a movie jigsawed together from dozens of sources, some American, some Italian, some schizophrenic, and all told in the loudest voice possible, replete with absurd tonal shifts, awful dubbing, and a soundtrack that swerves like a drunk through jazz, brooding synthesizers, and marching band madness. It is as broken as the mind of its antagonist, a black-gloved, balaclava-wearing maniac lopping the limbs off of coeds with his trusty chainsaw.

The movie begins with a young boy doing a jigsaw puzzle. Emblazoned on the front is a nude woman. The boy's mother does approve of this activity. She begins gathering up his toys, threatening to burn them. Not taking this lying down, the boy hacks her to pieces with an axe. Once the police arrive, the boy hides in a closet and, when found, pretends he was hiding from the killer. Forty years later, he stalks coeds on a college campus in Boston (which is actually Madrid, and yes, you will notice it), chopping off limbs and carting them back to his hideout. Why? Well, to jigsaw together another nude woman, of course.

While we do have a lead character (an unlikely ladies' man named Kendell), and the usual coppers out to catch the killer (led by Lt. Bracken, played by the great Christopher George), most of our attention is centered on the bevy of beautiful, and usually quite naked, female cannon fodder. One woman has her head cut off as she lounges on the campus lawn. Another is nearly suffocated in a pool by a mesh net around her head (not drowned, mind you; suffocated) before having her torso taken. Women are mutilated on water beds, cleaved in half in showers, and have their arms removed with a chainsaw, all with the subtlety of a Herschell Gordon Lewis splatter movie.

Eventually, Kendell joins forces with the police to find the killer. They even put an undercover cop on campus, the lovely Ms. Riggs, played by Linda Day George. She is about 20 years older than Kendell, but that does not stop them from making eyes at one another. Considering we are told from the start that these events are happening forty years after the opening murder, the suspect list is short. It couldn’t possibly be the campus handiman, Willard, with his big bushy beard and perpetual side-eye, could it? Maybe Professor Brown. I mean, he is a closeted gay man, after all, which is usually (and regrettably) the sign of psychosis in movies like this. Or maybe it is Dean Reston. After all, he seems like the most normal person in the film, and if there is one thing I’ve learned from giallo films, it is never to trust the most normal person in the movie.

That’s right, folks, I said the G word, not because PIECES is a giallo - it isn't Italian, after all - but because it clearly has the giallo in its DNA. From its highly questionable and highly reductive psychological motives for the killings, to the way the movie lavishes Argento levels of attention on a fetish object, in this case, the bloody jigsaw puzzle that serves as a dimestore metaphor for the killer’s twisted pathology, PIECES is heavily giallo-coded.

Gialli often feature police inspectors who allow the lead to fully immerse themselves in the role of an amateur detective, even going so far as to provide them with leads, all so that they can act as detectives free of the moral codes of police agencies or, in some cases, to be used as live bait. Here, Lt. Bracken might as well have had Kendell deputized. For some reason, they put a college student in charge of protecting Ms. Riggs (who is an actual cop), and talk about him as if he has been on the force for ten years. Hell, he gets to help read through confidential files, and even gets to run headfirst into the climactic fray with the big boys.

There are other giallo-esque elements here. For example, transnational productions often necessitate that foreign cities act as stand-ins for recognizable American locations. It is never once convincing. It is clear that PIECES, like many Italian productions, was not filmed with live sound. Every line of dialogue is recorded in post or dubbed over, often poorly. If you are a fan of the giallo film in particular or Eurotrash in general, none of this will strike you as odd or be at all distracting. All that said, the film squarely leaves the realm of the giallo whenever the killer starts stalking around. The murder set-pieces in PIECES are not skillful or built around suspense. They are as blunt as a hammer strike, quick, nasty, and gratuitous. PIECES looks and sounds like a giallo, but it possesses the personality of a body count movie.

Which is a good thing, by the way, as the central murder mystery is fumbled well inside its own end zone. The solution to this entire puzzle is found in a single file and confirmed by a single phone call. It is such a mundane way to solve a murder mystery that I am glad that the film just wants to get it over with, so we can potentially slice up another victim. We do not need to take this seriously. We cannot take this seriously, even if we wanted to. In between Linda Day George’s histrionics, the inexplicable inclusion of a frenzied Bruce Lee imitator (who blames his attack on Ms. Riggs as the result of eating some bad chop suey), lines of dialogue like “the most beautiful thing in the world is smoking pot and fucking on a waterbed at the same time”, a gratuitous penis shot, endless female nudity, and the police carting away a collection of limbs that could not possibly have come from just one body, well… What the fuck could you even take seriously about this?

You could wax philosophical about the sex and death connection, the pairing of erotic imagery with bloodshed, the Freudian Oedipal complex and its implications regarding matricide, and the symbolic meaning behind having the stitched together collection of female bodies graphically attack the manhood of the first male within reach. You'll just look like a total buffoon doing it. Maybe if you were high enough, either on weapons-grade pot or your own farts, you could argue that PIECES is a meta-slasher film, one written and produced with the explicit purpose of being self-parody. It is, after all, pieced together from tropes. Childhood trauma acting as a catalyst for future murder? Check! College setting? Check! A veritable parade of sex and debauchery? Check! Useless cops? Check! A bucket of red herrings? Check! Graphic violence? Check!

Now see how all of this plays out in the laziest and craziest way possible? How could they possibly do that by accident? It must be a purposefully constructed piece of media crafted to act as a self-reflective horror film about excess and the way slasher movies rely on routine and repetition. Or whatever.

PIECES expects you to see where it is going. It is not trying to be novel or original, pushing boundaries, or offering up a narrative expansion of sub-genre norms. It is literally just the slasher film in a blender, pureed and poured in a giallo-shaped glass, sprinkled with some salt and mescaline. It is dumb, loud, gross, and did I mention dumb? But those are features, not bugs. PIECES is cotton candy, a brain-off, sound-up pleasure factory of bad movie cliches and practical gore effects. There is a damn good reason why people love this movie, and it has nothing to do with four-star acting and originality. PIECES does something few exploitation horror movies do: it delivers precisely what is promised on the poster.

It’s exactly what you think it is.