



“You don’t have to go to Texas for a chainsaw massacre,” is the infamous tagline from its iconic poster art, but I think the preferred, more succinct Pieces tagline comes below the poster’s fold: “It’s exactly what you think it is.”

There was no question in 1982 when people saw that poster hanging in a theater lobby or saw the trailer as to what they were getting. It was, as advertised, exactly what they thought it was. Citizen Kane it t’weren’t.

While I missed that original theatrical run, I did get to see Pieces in 1985 on the original Vestron Video VHS release of the film. As a young gorehound, it quickly became one of my favorite movies in the splatter genre. What it lacked in pretty much every single aspect of filmcraft, it more than made up for in buckets of blood and grue. The special effects set-pieces, the life’s blood, if you will, of any great slasher film, were so over-the-top for the time period that Pieces became a heralded masterpiece among the Fangoria-subscription crowd.





Original Vestron VHS box art



The film begins in the 1940s with a small child being scolded by his domineering mother who catches him putting together a pornographic jigsaw puzzle. The child, angry at having his puzzle taken away, returns with an axe and hacks his mother to bits. Everything then flashes forward to the 1980s where horny students on a college campus start getting butchered in various ways—mostly by chainsaw—by a mysterious killer who is saving pieces of the victims to construct a human jigsaw puzzle.The premise itself is so absolutely retarded, the movie can’t fail.







As I got older, I began to appreciate Pieces for being more than just a gore flick. It became more and more apparent to me upon subsequent viewings and shares with friends that the film, in spite of, or because of, its many flaws is highly entertaining. At times it’s riotously funny. There are certain scenes that come to mind for myself, but any fan of the film would likely name the same scenes—possibly quoting them verbatim. There are scenes in Pieces that, perhaps because of the ESL problems of a Spanish production, or because of simple low-budget ineptitude, are unintentionally hilarious. There’s of course the “smoking pot and fucking on a waterbed” scene, and Lynda Day George’s infamous “BASTARD!” scene:





And then there’s the bizarrely out-of-place “bad chop suey” scene:





Aside from these bits of (unintentional) humor, the film is actually quite riveting because it has a tidy little giallo-like murder mystery going on in conjunction with the on-screen kills… with lots of red herrings to keep the audience guessing.





Who could the murderer be? Is it the guy from ‘Popeye’?



Pieces is simply one of my favorite exploitation horror films. Period. I can think of few movies as ragingly, mindlessly fun as this one. A couple of years ago I was asked to curate a monthly cult film night at a local arthouse theater, and Pieces was the very first film I submitted as a selection. It was at the top of my list. We ended up having to wait a bit to get the film because at that time Grindhouse Releasing was working on a brand-new, meticulously cleaned-up print… the very print that is used for their brand new Blu-ray release. It was worth the wait to see that glorious print in the theater, and even more so worth the wait to see it on the amazingly jam-packed new Blu-ray release.





Artwork for Grindhouse Releasing’s new 3 disc ‘Pieces’ set. Released March,1st, you can pre-order by clicking the photo.



The new Blu-ray set from Grindhouse Releasing is really something special, and packed with goodies that I should mention here. There are two versions of the film: the English language version with score by CAM that most of us in the States are used to seeing, as well as a Spanish language version with the film’s original piano-heavy soundtrack by Librado Pastor. Your mileage may vary, but I found Pastor’s soundtrack kind of hokey in a “this sounds like the score to a Keystone Cops comedy” sort of way. The “CAM” which the soundtrack in the American version is credited to is actually “Creazioni Artistiche Musicali,” which was an Italian music publisher who supplied “library music” to Pieces, which were themselves “pieces” taken from a bunch of other Italian films including Joe D’Amato’s over-the-top Absurd. These “pieces” can be found on one of the three discs in Grindhouse Releasing’s set, which is an audio CD of the complete score, which, for me, was quite a score indeed. Another disc in the set contains a number of bonus features, including interviews with the director, one of the producers, and one of the actors, Paul Smith. Perhaps the best of the extras is a full-length documentary on the grindhouse theater phenomenon in New York during the ‘70s and ‘80s titled 42nd Street Memories. That feature is so good, it’s practically worth the price of the set itself. Finally, some lucky consumers will end up with one of the 3000 copies of the set that have a small puzzle replica of the jigsaw puzzle seen in the film. Not every copy of the set contains this puzzle and the copies with puzzles aren’t marked. Consider it a “golden ticket.” Yeah, I got one.







Now Pieces certainly isn’t the best horror film ever made, but it may be the best of a certain type of horror film. It’s utterly ridiculous gory fun and best viewed with a group of people with some form of liquid or herbal sensory-enhancement available. If you’ve seen the movie, YOU KNOW… as for the rest of you: it’s exactly what you think it is.



View the original trailer here: