the audience applauded

Stylish but barely mediocre overall

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

"Pieces" follows a college campus where a psychopath with psychosexual problems is hacking up pretty, naked coeds with a chainsaw. How many victims will be claimed, and can an incredulous detective and an undercover cop solve the case?One of the notoriously-trashy slashers from the early eighties, "Pieces" is an unforgettable piece of celluloid (pardon the pun) because it's both an absolute disaster and something of a mild masterpiece in the realm of trash cinema. I did not like this film when I first saw it years ago, though it has grown on me. I still think it's patently bad, but it does have its charms.The narrative is a disaster-poor editing and unrefined writing are part of what make "Pieces" the bad film that it is; it's also unoriginal, cribbing elements of several of its contemporaries. What's good about the film? The main selling point is the over-the-top, gruesome gore effects, which are actually rather effective; the other is the dingy, rough-around-the-edges aesthetic the film has, which a potential viewer will either find off-putting or inexplicably attractive. I fall into the latter; the film's gritty, low-budget presentation gives it something of a hard edge that I find appealing, especially paired with the gore effects.The acting is all over the place and the film suffers from bad dubbing (this was a Spanish production with token American actors Christopher George and Lynda Day George), though the finale, as rough and abrupt as it is, is rather unforgettable (and unconscionable). Overall, "Pieces" is a mixture of both bad and good, and the kind of film that caters to a very specific audience. It's bad, but it is amusing, and I do find its atmosphere weirdly engrossing all these years later. 6/10.

When the general public thinks of a slasher film with no redeeming value whatsoever, chances are they're thinking about this movie. It is at the same time the best and worst film you've ever watched. But more importantly, it is never ever boring.Back in 1942, a young boy named Timmy was putting together a jigsaw puzzle of a naked woman. His mother, understandably, is upset and demands he get a garbage bag to throw the puzzle away. Instead, he came back with an axe to her head and then cut her up with a hacksaw. He hides in a closet and the police send him to live with his aunt, as they believe whoever killed his mother had escaped.This all happens within the first minute of this movie. Yes, Pieces packs more gore and strangeness into sixty records than most movies do in ninety minutes.Forty years later, a man in black opens a box that has the bloody clothing of Timmy's mom and a photograph of her. He opens the nude jigsaw puzzle, which is covered in blood and begins to play with it. I hope he has all the pieces! This is why we never buy old puzzles at the thrift store.Cut to (no pun intended) a girl studying outside, who gets her head chopped off by a chainsaw and stolen. Lt. Bracken (Christopher George, Day of the Animals, City of the Living Dead) and Sgt. Holden (Frank Braña, Yellow Hair and the Fortress of Gold, If You Shoot…You Live, God Forgives…I Don't!) start their investigation, meeting the dean (Edmund Purdom, Absurd, 2019: After the Fall of New York) and anatomy Professor Brown (Jack Taylor, Horror of the Zombies, Conan the Barbarian). Rounding out our suspects would be Willard (Paul Smith, Bluto from Altman's Popeye, one of the first movies that I remember hating as a child), a groundskeeper who is using a chainsaw.Then, in the library, Kendall gets a note from a girl, telling him to come see her at the pool. The killer reads the note first and chainsaws the girl to, well, pieces. Willard is arrested and the detectives find the chainsaw and the girl's body…except for her torso (no, not 1973's Torso).Read more at http://bit.ly/2zuwUTs

You probably know, right from the beginning, if this is the sort of movie you might like or not. This is a movie that requires a certain penchant for candy apple blood, ridiculous murders and even more ridiculous plot lines. DO NOT got into this just for the gore. If you are an admitted gorehound and that's all you are interested in, you will appreciate the murders, but probably come away wondering why you just spent 90 minutes on this movie.Essentially, an American attempt to make a giallo film. It has all of the bad trademarks of that style with very few of the good things. We get a black-glove killer and a lame mystery whodunit as we try to determine which character is the killer. We get plenty of bad dialog from people speaking like no one you've ever met in real life. It's full of ludicrous plot points. A tennis champion spends her days working as a secretary in a police office (because they don't have sponsors or training to do or anything like that). She volunteers to go undercover in an attempt to capture the killer. The officer in charge worries for her safety, though, so rather than put a few uniforms to watch over her, he enlists a college kid who was a suspect five minutes ago. The college kid gets more and more involved until they've basically done all but give him a badge. All of this is only really necessary to set up one final shock in the movie.The giallo style is mixed quite heavily with sleazy exploitation horror. It wants very badly to feel like a "dirty movie" and I don't necessarily mean pornographic, but it wants to capture that MANIAC feeling where the viewer walks away unclean from having viewed something nasty. It never really figures out how to accomplish that, though. Plenty of reviews will focus on the nudity and the gore. I didn't find much more nudity than you would see in any number 0f 80s horrors. As for the gore, there is plenty of it. While no DEAD ALIVE, each murder shows the director gleefully spraying the red stuff all over the scene.It's a bad movie, but there's something really amusing about it. I hate to use the "so bad it's good" because most bad movies are just bad. However, the silly plot and characters, the bad attempts at humor and the memorable murders all add up to make this at least memorable, if not really good.

This 1982 horror film stars Christopher George, Lynda Day, Ian Sera, Edmund Purdom and Paul L. Smith. This begins with a young boy working on a jigsaw puzzle and soon he kills his demanding mother. Forty years later, a mysterious killer starts butchering selected victims at a college campus with chainsaws and knives. He uses their parts to make a jigsaw puzzle in the form of a body. The late, George (Graduation Day) plays police lieutenant, Bracken who tries to find the killer, George's wife, Day plays tennis player, Mary Riggs, Sera plays student, Kendall who helps the police, Purdom plays the Dean and Smith (Popeye) plays grounds keeper, Willard. This is a decent slasher flick with some gruesome deaths and a good, atmospheric score I recommend for fans of the genre.