Pieces (

1982

)

A good horror movie doesn’t have to have flawless writing to succeed. Indeed, for a certain class of sleazy, violent films, bad writing is just as much an asset as quality gore effects and copious nudity. Pieces is the very definition of dumb horror movie fun. The writing is atrocious, absolutely riddled with plot holes, contrivances, and other assorted stupidity to the point where I genuinely started to wonder if it wasn’t a deliberate parody. Yet, when you enter the movie with the right mindset, picking out these absurd issues becomes an amusing pastime while you’re waiting for the next gratuitous shower scene or grotesque murder. I would hesitate to call it great art, but I’ll be damned if it isn’t solid entertainment!

This pleasant idiocy is present right from the get-go when we’re shown a pre-credits scene that tells us it’s Boston 1942. However, you wouldn’t be able to tell that from the props, costumes, or dialog as those all have a very distinctive early 1980s quality to them. We see a creepy little boy assembling a pornographic jigsaw puzzle, but the model on it is about as far from a mid-century pin-up girl as is possible in terms of hairstyle, makeup, and physique. Hell, the whole concept of a pornographic jigsaw puzzle at all from this vintage is dubious. This was an age before Playboy magazine, where an entire generation had to travel to continental Europe just to learn what oral sex was.

The boy’s mother comes in and promptly has a huge meltdown over this unseemly toy and starts screaming at him and smashing mirrors. She’s upset because apparently her husband, is a bit of a philanderer and she can’t stand to see her son go down the same path as him. This unseen husband won’t be appearing in the film, as he is abroad fighting in Europe with the Air Force, quite the feat since that’s a branch of the US armed forces that won’t be established until 1947! At this point, all the American aviators and their ground support crews are part of either the Army or Navy.

Mom continues to insult the boy as she ransacks his room looking for more pornographic material. She demands the boy fetch her a plastic bag to put all the stuff in because she wants to take it outside and burn it. This is a bad idea, as burning plastic will release toxic fumes but it’s an even worse idea because in 1942 plastics were almost nonexistent and the first one-piece plastic bag would only be patented in 1965! Mom’s hysterics and apparent time travel seems to have awakened the lingering killer instinct inside her son, so he caves her head in with an axe and then saws her body into chunks. The boy then hides in a closet and waits for the police to show up, when they get there, he tells them that his mother was killed by a “big man.”

For the next forty years, the boy’s bloodlust would remain dormant, only being triggered when he witnesses a scene straight out of a Tom and Jerry cartoon: A girl riding a skateboard down a busy sidewalk collides with two guys moving a huge mirror. Apparently, the sight of glass shattering reminds him of his mom breaking the glass and that was enough to kick-start a killing spree. We’re sure lucky that for the past 40 years this guy has been lucky enough to never see a broken mirror, because as soon as he sees the glass shatter he grabs a chainsaw and decapitates the first co-ed he can find.

Once the killer is a full adult, we’re dealing with strict Giallo rules, so all we ever see is his hands wearing black leather gloves, shots from his POV while he’s stalking his victims, and in one particularly stylish case a darkened silhouette peering through a window. This introduces an element of mystery into the proceedings, and Pieces is quick to throw a whole bunch of red herrings at its audience. The problem is, Pieces does not really understand the concept of a red herring. To function as a red herring, the viewer needs to see the character as at least possibly the real killer; indeed, the more convincing the red herring the better. Yet the first red herring we’re introduced to: the oddball Professor Brown who keeps a human skull, dodges police questions suspiciously, and has simmering resentment for the female students, cannot possibly be the killer as it’s mentioned that he lives with his mother. Likewise, when the film introduces a male student named Kendall James it makes a point of showing he was mysteriously missing during the killer’s second murder. However, we know that Kendall wasn’t even a twinkle in his father’s eye in 1942, so there’s no way that he can possibly be the killer. Eventually, the police seem to come to the same conclusion, and even let Kendall assist in the investigation; of course, unless they watched the film’s opening too, they wouldn’t be able to rule him out as a suspect!

Then there is Willard, a gigantic gardener who pervs on the students while tending to the grounds, though I can’t hold this against him as the students at this college seem to be screwing outside, in the open, in the middle of the day. It would be enough to distract anyone! We know that he’s not the killer because he’s about six inches taller than the killer we see in silhouette and roughly twice as wide. Still, he’s a better red herring than most, so the film goes out of its way to make sure that he’s still a viable candidate, even when it must break the rules of reality a bit to do so. Early on, the huge brute is arrested by the cops after they find him with the mangled remains of a victim, and the cops inexplicably release him for lack of evidence. This would be bad enough but in the process of arresting the huge bastard, he beat the living snot out of three police officers, so at the very least the cops should be able to charge him with resisting arrest and at least take him off the street. Worse still, apparently, the Boston Police Department can’t spar the manpower to surveil a suspected serial killer, so Willard is left to run wild for the rest of the movie.

This highlights a larger problem with the film, namely that the police are unfathomably idiotic. They start their investigation by concealing all news of the killing from the press and even the other members of the student body, a feat that I doubt the Boston Police Department could accomplish even if they wanted to. I’m sure this is a case of minor cultural misunderstanding, as suppressing all news of a murder investigation would be child’s play for the Guardia Civil in director Juan Piquer Simón’s native Spain. However, even if we assume that police could keep all news of this away from pesky journalists there is little reason why they would want to. After the first murder, they don’t know immediately that they’re dealing with a serial killer, indeed it’s far more likely the killer is someone the girl knew before. They need to be interviewing the friends and relatives of the murdered girl to see if she was killed by a scorned lover or a persistent stalker. If that doesn’t turn up any leads, they need to at least warn the poor students at this school to not go out alone after dark. As it stands their actions are not only not going to help them catch the killer but also probably get more innocents killed.

While some of the idiocy seems to be institutional, most of the bone-headed decisions emerge from the mouth of the film’s top cop: Lt. Frank Bracken. Bracken is the guy who invites Professor Brown to examine a freshly killed body and a blood-soaked chainsaw to determine if the chainsaw is the murder weapon, a conclusion that anyone with eyes could probably manage. While professor Brown is a biologist specializing in human anatomy and can give something approaching an expert’s opinion on the matter there’s no pressing need to use him. After all, the detective notes that the coroner is already en route. Brown then immediately touches the weapon getting his fingerprints all over it, contaminating the crime scene! It’s almost like it would have been a good idea to wait for the actual forensic investigator who is on his way. Even dumber, when the police send their own undercover agent, Mary Riggs, to pose as the college’s tennis instructor, Frank immediately leaks her identity to Kendall James for no earthly reason. Even if he’s sure that James isn’t the killer (an absolutely insane conclusion given the evidence at his disposal), James is more than capable of gossiping and spreading the information about Rigg’s identity to the real murderer.

At a certain point, you must start wondering: Is the movie in on the joke? Indeed, as I was re-watching Pieces for this review, I started to wonder how much of this incompetence was accidental and how much of it was a deliberate attempt at humor, as, despite the grisly gore, Pieces maintains a bizarrely upbeat tone throughout. It reminds me of nothing so much as the extreme exploitation movies from Hong Kong that feature all manner of violence, depravity, and gross-out effects but nonetheless maintain a peppy, upbeat attitude.

Indeed, as the movie progresses Pieces begins to crack some outright jokes. At one point after being assigned to the college beat, Mary Riggs is attacked by the school’s Kung Fu Professor Mr. Chao (played by Wong Kin-lung better known as Bruce Le one of the innumerable Bruce Lee look-alikes that cropped up after the star’s untimely death). This whole scene comes out of nowhere and feels like the kung-fu priest sequence in Dead Alive (1992). Following that, the movie has an absurd fake-out scare where Kendall’s dweeby friend jumps out at him out of nowhere in a Halloween mask only to remove the mask, laugh, and fade back into darkness. These are not the actions of a film that wants its audience to take it completely seriously. Indeed, the lighter tone is an asset to the proceedings, if Pieces was a completely serious horror movie all the stupidity of the writing would probably tank it immediately. That it adopts a somewhat jovial tone gives the audience an excuse to laugh at it.

Of course, it doesn’t hurt that Pieces is determined to deliver its audience a copious helping of blood and boobies. On the one hand, we have hapless victims being sliced up by chainsaws, with some quite impressively done decapitations and dismemberings. Some effects fall short of convincing (in one scene you can see the killer’s knife bend after he plunges into a victim’s head, revealing that it’s rubber rather than steel) but for the most part, they are quite impressive. Of special note here is the use of real chainsaws hacking through pig carcasses, which in extreme close-ups is quite convincing as human flesh. On the other hand, we have a parade of nubile actresses taking their clothes off for increasingly contrived reasons. My personal favorite is the blonde who goes for a late-night swim in the school pool and takes off her clothes to reveal she’s wearing a bikini underneath. Then for some unknown reason removes the bikini top as well. It’s not like she’s skinny dipping with friends or boys either, she’s just by herself. Why bother with the bikini top if you’re not going to swim in it?