Pieces, 1982.
Directed by J. P. Simon.
Starring Christopher George, Edmund Purdom, Paul L. Smith and Linda Day.
SYNOPSIS:
Ten-year-old Timmy is scolded by his mother for playing with a rather saucy jigsaw, whereupon Timmy violently and suddenly kills his mother with an axe. Forty years later, a serial killer is stalking a university campus, butchering college girls with a chainsaw. Soon detectives desperate to catch the killer send in an undercover officer to find the murderer hiding amongst the campus staff before he can strike again.
So dear readers here we are October 31st, Halloween, and sadly the end of the road for this year’s cavalcade of horror.
We’ve had a lot of fun looking at films with zombies, chainsaw-wielding wise-asses, flesh eating parasites, creepy pop-up books, knife-wielding psychopaths, Mark Duplass, and much more. I’ve enjoyed watching all these films and I’ve loved writing about them, and I sincerely hope that all of you have stuck with me these 31 days have enjoyed reading about them.
Alas we must end this crazy train of ours, so as my final review for this wonderful season I’ve chosen the cult 1982 slasher B-movie Pieces, a film which might just be one of the silliest slasher films of the 80s and a film that was recommended to be by a late friend who passionately lobbied me to watch it.
They say that if you gave every monkey in the world a typewriter they would eventually produce the works of Shakespeare; while the possible accuracy of that statement is questionable, they would almost definitely write a better film than Pieces.
The film attempts to present itself as a “whodunnit” mystery, like a particularly violent episode of Murder She Wrote, although if Angela Lansbury starred in Pieces the mystery would be solved before the opening credits end, and she would be the bloody killer.
You don’t have to be Columbo to work out who the killer is here – just look out for the only middle aged person who works at the campus, given that he was a child in the 1940s. And the killer isn’t the hulking bearded groundskeeper, who the film tries to make you think it is; even though he’s about twice the size of the trench coat-wearing psycho, he looks like he’d be more at home picking a fight with Popeye.
The murder hunt angle is not exactly helped by the fact that everyone in this film has the intelligence of a squashed dog turd, unable to notice a black-clad heavy breathing psychopath walking through the library, even though said library is FILLED WITH BLOODY PEOPLE.
Don’t even get me started on the film’s detectives, who can’t seem to figure out if a bloody chainsaw is connected to a dismembered corpse sitting next to it. These guys are sure to give Sherlock Holmes a run for his money with deduction skills like these.
The film is packed to the rafters with just sheer bizarreness, like our main heroine, a tennis star moonlighting as an undercover detective, as most tennis stars are known to do. I hear Andy Murray busts crack dens with the Drugs Squad on weekends. Or how in the midst of a murder hunt, a Bruce Lee lookalike thinks it’s a good idea to jump out and attack people, IN THE DEAD OF BLOODY NIGHT!!!
The two best moments of bizarre stupidity for me, though, have to be the woman who skateboards face first into a huge sheet of glass dying horribly. A moment that is completely forgetting about by the film and never mentioned again, like it’s a common occurrence at this campus. But the other bizarre moment, is a real ball buster, literally. Without ruining it any more than I have already, let’s just say they pop.
I’ve reviewed a few European horror films this October and if you’re an avid watcher of them you’ll notice that quite often they often star European actors who are dubbed into English, sometimes quite well as with Suspiria, or quite badly as with…….uh…..pretty much all the others.
In Pieces we have bad dubbing galore, with mismatched voices, unenthusiastic or overly enthusiastic line deliveries and a veritable boatload of questionable dialogue. Like how a character simply stops to scream “BASTARD” about a thousand times, just in case the killer didn’t quite catch it the first three times.
Certainly, the most questionable dubbing goes to the clone of Bruce Lee, who you can bet your sweet behind is given a voice that wouldn’t sound out of place in an old Charlie Chan movie: short answer slightly racist.
Pieces is simply an awful film, filled with clichéd characters, a mystery plot that could be solved by a foetus, dripping with gory violence and copious amounts of sleazy, completely unnecessary nudity. Though as with many of the bad films I’ve watched this October, it might be crap, but it’s still bloody good fun.
All the qualities that most “serious” critics would say renders the films as “trash” or “schlock” are what make this film really bloody funny to watch, like it knows it can’t succeed as a serious slasher so it’s just going for the jugular and trying to be fun, and in my view, that’s the whole point of films like these.
If I’ve tried to say anything with this season of horror reviews it’s that the main reason I love horror so much is because it’s fun. I like to be scared, I like to laugh when films fail at trying to scare me, I cackle like a madman when watching a complete bastard being torn apart by zombies and I now find that I just about shit myself every time I see Mark Duplass on screen, even when he’s just in an episode of Togetherness.
Some of you reading might find my choice of film for this final review perhaps a tad anti-climactic, given that’s it a relatively little-known slasher and quite frankly it stinks worse than a rubbish dump filled with soiled nappies and copies of Fifty Shades of Grey. So allow me to explain my reasoning for this choice.
I didn’t choose Pieces as my final review because it’s an acclaimed classic beloved by all. I chose Pieces because it’s another film that I feel is best watched with your friends gathered around you, relishing the sheer absurdity of what’s on screen, laughing at the daft dubbing, idiotic characters and ridiculous plot. If you take away anything from this season dear readers, it’s this sentiment.
Watching horror can be an enjoyable experience when you watch it alone at night, huddled in front of your TV, but trust me, nothing beats watching a horror film, bad or good, with your friends screaming and laughing along with you.
Thank you all for sticking with me through all the horrors that this October has had to offer and I wish you all a safe and happy Halloween.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★ ★
Graeme Robertson
