Classic Horror Movie Review: 'Pieces'

Pieces (1983)

Directed by Juan Piquer Simion

Written by Dick Randall, Roberto Loyola

Starring Christopher George, Paul Smith, Edmund Purdom, Linda Day

Release Date October 14th, 1983

Published October 17th, 2023

Pieces? Where have you been for all of my horror movie loving life. Pieces is a 1983 slasher movie that perfectly mixes camp and horror. The film is often hysterically over the top and genuinely gross in gory set pieces well at home in the horror genre. It's not an easy balance between being goofy and scary and Pieces really hits the sweet spot. I can't say that anyone making Pieces knew they were making a goofball melodrama crossed with a bloody slasher movie, I imagine they thought they were just making an exploitation film. And yet, what they made is exactly what I love about 80s horror, a hilariously overwrought drama and a slasher movie.

Pieces centers on a child named Timmy Reston. It's 1942 and Timmy's daddy is fighting in World War 2. On the home front, Timmy has found some of dad's risque collection of... puzzles. Well, one puzzle specifically, one of a nude, smiling woman. When Timmy's mom catches him putting the puzzle together, she reacts with fury and plans to burn the puzzle and everything Timmy owns in revenge for this lustful heart. Timmy, being perhaps even more dramatic than his mother, runs to grab an ax which he uses to split his mother's skull and dismember her body. Timmy manages this just as his governess is arriving at the home. She calls the Police and though Timmy is covered in blood and his mother's head is in his closet, they assume he's just a traumatized kid and not the killer.

Cut to 40 years later, it's 1982 and we get our first bizarre non-sequitur moment. On a college campus, we see a young friendly girl on roller skates. She's waving to friends and appears to be a beloved young person. Shots of her on her roller skates are cross-cut with the arrival of a van for a glass company. We see the girl on skates and workers exiting the vehicle. She skates faster and more excited and the workers are removing a sheet of glass from the van. You know where this is heading and exactly what you think is going to happen, happens, she crashes into the glass. Is she dead? You might assume so. Why did we witness this? Beats me, there is zero explanation for this happening.

Cut to a disconcertingly young woman laying in the grass doing homework, her skirt bunching up to nearly reveal her under garments. In the bushes, a man with a chainsaw is watching and breathing heavily. This scene is a very interesting juxtaposition. In most horror movies, the killer does not kill in public in broad daylight. He's also using a very conspicuous murder weapon, a very loud chainsaw which he uses to cut up the young woman in broad daylight. He takes her head and leaves. I liked this scene, it was weird and bold and very unexpected.

We haven't even established a main character in Pieces yet and really, we don't get much of a main character throughout the entirety of Pieces. Cops arrive on campus after the young woman's headless body is found. Christopher George is Lt. Frank Bracken and Frank Brana is Sgt Randy Holden. They are the lead detectives on the case but they need a woman to really help crack the case. Thus, Lt. Bracken seeks out Mary Riggs (Linda Day), a department paper pusher who is eager to go into the field, even if it means acting as bait for a serial killer. Riggs will subsequently do nothing and add nothing to either the movie or the investigation and I love that for her.

The closest thing we have to a main character is a college kid named Kendall (Ian Sera). Kendall is quite apparently the insert character for the makers of Pieces. He looks like a curly haired dork but in reality, he's an irresistible sex machine who all the girls are begging to sleep with. We meet Kendall as he promises to meet one girl for sex in the college pool and then hooks up with a different girl in the library. It's a fateful choice of sex partners as the poor girl who goes to the pool to wait for Kendall is murdered with a chainsaw.

The pool death scene is hysterically presented as the killer uses is a pool skimmer to grab his victim by the head. She subsequently can be seen clearly holding the skimmer over her head as she's dragged out of the pool. She's topless, naturally, and as she lays on the pool deck, gasping for air but very much alive, she watches as the killer grabs his chainsaw and walks several feet to where she is. You might be thinking that she should simply roll into the pool but, sadly, dear reader, this rather obvious conclusion is not so obvious to the victim in this scenario.

Kendall immediately becomes a suspect as he was intended to meet the victim at the pool. Good luck for Kendall however, a creepy gardener becomes the main suspect, until he isn't. Then, the main suspect seems to be an anatomy Professor, Professor Brown (Jack Taylor), a creepy, off putting weirdo with a taste for human anatomy. The college Dean, Dean Foley (Edmund Purdom), also seems to push the cops toward Professor Brown based solely on the Dean's belief that Brown is a homosexual. Whether Professor Brown is gay or not is never resolved but I love what an obvious red herring he is and the blatant and horrific homophobia is just a perfect nasty sign of the times.

Pieces isn't done with bizarre, reductive hatreds. In a scene that makes no sense and is apropos of nothing, Mary is searching the campus late at night searching for the chainsaw killer. As she turns a corner, she bumps into an Asian man who proceeds to assault her with karate poses and near miss chops. Why? We will never know. Kendall, who was watching this scene from afar arrives just as Mary's attacker has seemingly knocked himself unconscious. Kendall explains that this man is his karate professor. The man gets up off of the ground, says hello to Kendall and leaves the scene. What! Just! Happened??? I have no idea but it's very funny and I don't think it was intended to be.

Several gruesome chainsaw deaths later, the killer is randomly assigned to one of the characters we've met in the movie and the film ends on a nasty but impressively silly visual. Throughout the movie we've watched the killer returning to his childhood home to assemble his naked lady puzzle. At the same time, the killer has been collecting pieces of his victims that he's been assembling like a completely different kind of puzzle. The result of this human puzzle comes tumbling out of a closet and lands on poor Kendall, likely scarring his psyche forever.

Oh but it doesn't end there because the movie has one more bizarre twist that involves poor Kendall and his often busy manhood. I won't spoil it for you but it's a memorable if completely left field visual gag that calls into question whether Kendall really is the insert character for the filmmakers as I described him earlier. Why is this here? How did this happen? Why is this here? I am baffled by the choice but that's Pieces in a nutshell, so to speak. The film is chockablock with non-sequitur oddities and this ending is the cherry on top of that particularly foul filmmaking sundae. Don't get me wrong, I love Pieces, but this ending and these bizarre added scenes are hard to justify beyond how insane they are.

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