Le Sadique à la tronçonneuse

'Pieces' is a wonderfully entertaining trashy slasher movie. Dumb, but lots of fun. It has impeccable exploitation credentials - directed by the guy who gave us 'Slugs - The Movie' and co-written by both Dick Randall (assorted kung fu and Emanuelle movies) and shlockmaster Joe D'Amato, director of the legendary 'Antropophagus'(a.k.a. 'The Grim Reaper') to name the most notorious of his 150+ movies. Plus the star is Christopher George ('The Exterminator', Fulci's 'City Of The Living Dead'). George plays a cop sent in to investigate some bloody slayings on a college campus (the movie is Spanish but tries to pretend it's American). The viewer knows the killer is obsessed with female bodies and there is a recurring motif involving jigsaws and mirrors. As in most slasher movies there are plenty of suspects to choose from, including a scary looking gardener (cult favourite Paul Smith, 'Midnight Express', 'Crimewave'), a Professor of Anatomy (Jack Taylor, who appeared in a few Jess Franco classics like 'Succubus' and 'Eugenie'), and the Dean (Edmund Purdom, 'The Fifth Cord', 'Ator'). The lovely Lynda Day (Christopher George's wife) plays an undercover tennis coach(!) and spaghetti western veteran Frank Brana is George's sidekick. If you approach 'Pieces' with the right frame of mind you'll have a hell of a good time. It's bloody, completely illogical and contains the most unexpected martial arts scene in the history of horror movies (yeah, I know...)

While playing with a puzzle, a teenager is repressed by his mother, and he kills her and severs her body with an ax. Forty years later, in an university campus in Boston, a serial killer kills young women and severs their bodies in parts, stealing body pieces from each student. Lt. Bracken (Christopher George) makes a deal with the dean of the campus, and infiltrates the agent Mary Riggs (Lynda Day George) as if she were a tennis teacher and together with the student Kendall (Ian Sera), they try to find the identity of the killer.

"Pieces" is so bad, senseless and ridiculous, that contradictory becomes very hilarious and a slash, gore and cheesy cult-movie. The first funny points are the beautiful naked "actresses", always naked to be killed - all the victims are women with delicious bodies. The dialogs, screams and situations are so absurd that become another attraction: the tennis player that is an undercover cop to survive; or the student that accesses the documents and help the police in the investigation itself; or the killer that starts killing forty years after his first death with unexplained reasons or trigger. I could list lots of unreasonable situations in the screenplay, but better off the viewer finds them (and certainly will). The bloody effects are good, but when the killer is stabbing a woman on a water bed, the terrible cut is absolutely visible. I personally liked this film a lot, but I only recommend it for fans of trash-movies. My vote is seven.

Title (Brazil): "O Terror da Serra Elétrica" ("The Chainsaw Terror")

Note: On 05 July 2020, I saw this film again.

A young boy chops up his mother when she won't let him play with a pornographic puzzle and, 40 years later, he decides to recreate said puzzle for real - with the body parts of college girls.

Pieces is stupid. Really stupid. I'm not sure if there was even a script or outline for this movie or if they just made it up on the spot. The international cast and crew might not have been the best with English, because some of the dialogue and translations add to the bizarre hilarity of the film. Characters come and go for no reason throughout and motivations never made much sense at all. For a murder mystery, there's also not a lot of mystery as there are really only two choices for who the killer could be. If you like gore, there's plenty of it here and most of it is very convincing and might even be disturbing if it was in a better, more cohesive film.

First saw this on opening night in 1983 Recently revisited and it's just so much cheesy/gory fun: atrocious acting, suspects all over the place, a killer in giallo gear, amazing chainsaw murders, and arguably the most absurd ending in slasher film history. Gotta love it!

A strange slasher film with some very poor acting. Paul L. Smith wins the honours for worse acting in this daft gore flick but he is also the most entertaining as the very unhelpful gardener whose chainsaw goes on walkabout (why he never feels the need to lock it up to keep it away from the deranged killer is beyond me, but then again there are many points like this in this film). For such a big campus we have very few suspects, three in total (which includes the gardener who is ruled out pretty early) which get wittled down even quicker within the first 30 minutes leaving the viewer with only one glaringly obvious suspect, but never mind... How the murder gets around the campus with this chainsaw hidden is beyond me but there are some pretty neat hacking and dismemberment to watch and the piles of limbs left behind is quite comical. Speaking of which, we are subjected to a hilarious scene when undercover tennis playing police woman finds another victim in the changing rooms (this victim is sawn in half and the legs taken. She screams out "Bastard!" numerous times whilst clenching her fists, and then we have a random martial arts instructor kicking out at her in another scene for absolutely no reason..! There is a God-awful and stupid plot twist 20 seconds at the end of the film that makes no sense whatsoever and almost destroys what is a daft but fun addition to the slasher cycle. I give it 6 out of 10 (an extra point for the gore and a rather good axe job at the beginning of the film).