Pieces (1982)
You don’t have to go to Texas for a chainsaw massacre! Prepare to be slayed by a withering look by the quintessential midnight movie—the Spanish-American slasher, Pieces—known in certain dark circles as Chainsaw Devil, Chainsaw Bastard, and also by its sensationalist, hiperbólico title of Mil gritos tiene la noche (The Night Has 1,000 Screams or 1,000 Cries Has the Night). A young lad’s sexual development is seemingly stifled by his overbearing mother, causing him to grow up deranged, and when triggered by an unfortunate accident in which a jolly gal roller skates herself through a giant mirror, splitting it—and we assume, herself, into shards, the mystery murderer persists to chop up Boston campus chicks to construct his own, real-life, jigsaw lady.
This was a surefire gem from my 2021 Slash & Burn HorrOctober marathon. The tight running time, take-no-prisoner kills, abundant nudity, and Castilian flavour cement it as an archetypal coverall for newcomers to retro slashers, and connoisseurs alike. Take some uppers or something, and visit the only university where the students openly fornicate on lawns, and have perplexing martial arts altercations with dicky-tummied “kung fu professors.” Juan Piquer Simón (Slugs) surely paints a vivid picture. There’s a proper black hat, jacket, and gloves, giallo-referencing, heavy breathing (likely asthmatic) assailant, carving up pretty girls, and lopping off their lovely limbs, and it features, without doubt, the finest water bed murder ever committed to celluloid. In my preferred, dubbed American version, a pulsing, serpentine, shimmering score adds jittery suspense and thrust. Pieces also boasts a duo of exceedingly watchable rozzers—Det. Lt. Bracken, who resembles a butch Lionel Blair, and spends the whole movie trying to light his cigar, and his partner, Det. Sgt. Holden, who looks a bit like the love child of Frank Drebin and George Peppard. The daft dub adds a bonus, humorously offbeat bent to the proceedings, rendering every scene simplistic and direct, but with odd deliveries—ADR’d to match the lips of the original performances, and due to this, peculiar delays and stutters pepper the picture.
If you’ve ever wondered where the pectorals were, Pieces will clue you in—often graphically, with a frankly more nudes than necessary quota filled, bloodshed to spare, and unexpected beats so amusing and bizarre, they’ll keep newcomers to this kind of schlock thoroughly entertained. As is often the case with the slasher subgenre, a lot of it is elementary, but there’s a neat enough concept, delivered rapidly, smartly, and efficiently, and with a super brief, palatable, and digestible, 85-minute length, the trashiness is somehow muted by the devil-may-care abandon of it all. It’s also acutely aware of its red herring deployment, and a fairly fruitful whodunit—with the shifty dean of the university, the “sugarplum” anatomy teacher, Prof. Brown, and the chainsaw-wielding brute, Willard, each suspicious enough to keep us on our toes. Underneath lies a deftly made horror, with a shock wrap-up that ladies—and especially gents, won’t forget in a hurry. The final ten seconds or so of Pieces is either a vulgar, nonsensical jump scare, or a feminist vengeance statement that shrewdly undoes the misogynistic, male gaze, borderline-porno gorefest that precedes it.
Scarious Artists 