O Terror da Serra Elétrica

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).

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.

Whether or not this movie is an accidental camp comedy or if it was intended to be as silly as it was, Pieces delivers exactly what it promises - a chainsaw massacre that's not in Texas.

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.

While Pieces is not without its flaws, for low budgeted horror, Pieces delivers the gory goods. Notorious, for being on the UK's video nasty list, gorehounds will not be let down by this crazy and somewhat quirky 80's slasher. A killer is on the loose at a Boston,Mass area college brutally killing and mutilating gorgeous college girls to get body parts to put together a human jigsaw puzzle. For the most part, the overdubbing and acting is atrocious(with the exception of Christopher George as a police detective, who actually is really great in this), there are slow parts and subplots that go nowhere. But, I digress Pieces delivers huge as trashy grindhouse entertainment, with tons of nudity and some spectacular state of the art gore. Gore galore, with lots of boobage and 80's bush, Pieces will please fans of sleazeoid cinema and ultra violence. Add Bluto from the Robin Williams live action Popeye movie as groundskeeper and a cameo of Bruce Le showing his kung fu, you have an odd, but effective splatter film that is very over the top and cool low budget horror flick.