Juan Piquer Simón’s exploitation slasher Pieces (1982) has a bonkers reputation that precedes it, delivering one of horror’s most entertaining audience experiences of all time. The tagline, “It’s exactly what you think it is!” only scratches the surface of the weirdness within. Sure, you get exactly what you expect in terms of gore in this tale of a jigsaw puzzle-obsessed killer with a chainsaw, but the execution is so over the top there’s nothing that really prepares you for the unique brand of madness.
Simon was initially approached to helm a sequel to Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left, but passed because the script he was offered seemed too boring. Then he was offered a 30-page treatment for Pieces, then titled Jigsaw, intended at the time to be a made-for-TV movie. It was so insane that not only was he intrigued, he was determined to make the script believable.
Which makes me wonder just how insane this synopsis actually was on paper, because the final film is far from believable…
Opening with a 10-year old Timmy assembling a jigsaw puzzle of a nude woman, his mother walks in and yells at him about it. In response, he grabs an axe and hacks her to bits. The police find him in a closet, covered in his mother’s blood, and he blames some mysterious intruder for the murder. Cut to 40 years later. An unseen Timmy unboxes that same puzzle, and a wave of murders at a college campus begins anew, with the police stumped by the grisly murders.
On paper, that sounds normal enough, but what transpires is anything but normal.
Pieces puts together a whodunnit type slasher where the story doesn’t really seem interested in the mystery. The red herring is arrested immediately, without even giving much reason as to why they were a suspect in the first place. You get so caught up in the violent dismemberments that you forget you’re supposed to wonder who’s behind The Shadow inspired disguise. There’s also one of horror’s most infamous scenes randomly injected in the film; a kung fu instructor battling an undercover cop in the middle of the night for no reason at all. Story goes that producer/co-writer Dick Randall happened to be producing many Bruce Lee type martial arts films at the time and Simón wanted to pad out the runtime. Insert random nonsense. Cut and print.
Most surprising of all, though, is that for how gory the film is, the body count in Pieces is surprisingly low. Including the opening scene, Timmy racks up a kill count of 7 dismembered victims, a few less than the original Friday the 13th a couple years prior; on that note, keep your eyes peeled for an original Friday the 13th one sheet hidden in this very movie. But every single murder amasses a ton of blood and gore, as taking chainsaws to limbs is apt to do, and most of the gore effects involved actual pig carcasses and real slaughterhouse blood and organs.
There’s been a long-standing rumor that part of why Pieces is so over the top gory is because one of the writers is Joe D’Amato, of Anthropophagus infamy. It’s an unsubstantiated rumor, with Juan Piquer Simón confirming in multiple interviews that D’Amato hadn’t been involved in the film at all. Dick Randall did co-write with Roberto Loyola, however, an Italian producer, writer, and director with a talent for casting Giallo films. That influence is very much felt here.
Pieces has everything you could ever hope for in exploitation slasher cinema. Gratuitous nudity (both male and female), insane carnage, goofy dialogue, and an overall sense of gleeful reckless abandon makes for a film that’s one of the goriest slashers of the ‘80s, and still a perfect crowd pleaser over 40 years later.
Just wait until you see the insane final shot, which led to Eli Roth calling the bonkers and totally unexpected finale of 1982’s Pieces “the greatest ending in horror history.”
Pieces is now streaming on SCREAMBOX, Shudder, Tubi, Peacock and AMC+.
The post The Best Gore Movies You Need to See: ‘Pieces’ (1982) Delivers a Real Chainsaw Massacre appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.