Le Sadique à la tronçonneuse

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.

Crappy dialogues, crappy acting, fun gore, and some weird moments, this was trashy entertainment at it's finest

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 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.

How could I not love this movie? It is a rare cinematic occurrence indeed to find such delightfully sleazy ingredients as chainsaw massacres, disco aerobics, on screen vomiting, pornographic jigsaw puzzles, a girl wetting her pants, and a guy salivating over a woman's feet all in one place. Only from the combined minds of Joe D'Amato, Dick Randall, and J. Piquer Simon could such a thing spring forth – and judging from the number of reviews here, I'm not alone in my fondness for this movie.

Many of the cast members will be familiar to fans of these kinds of movies. Christopher George (having already been through Graduation Day and a trip to the Mortuary) is a strong lead as the no-nonsense detective on the case, while Jess Franco veteran Jack Taylor creeps around the increasingly decimated campus as an anatomy professor. Of course the victims are just anonymous dead meat, but then that's all they need to be.

Say what you will about the overall quality of the film, but one thing's for sure - Pieces doesn't suffer from a lack of blood and guts. The crimson stuff flows freely once the chainsaw starts up, and the movie actually lives up to the surprisingly honest tagline - `it's exactly what you think it is' - take it or leave it. And the ending - what an ending!