Then infamous, thankfully defunct DVD rip-off label Diamond issues a bargain-priced digital duplicate of the Vestron transfer with shallow contrast, careless compression, and inconsistent colors, which subsequently made the rounds in several dubious, cheapo horror movie collections. Meanwhile a very mildly widescreen (1.55:1) edition turned up on Venezuelan video under its Spanish title, Mil gritos tiene la noche (or One Thousand Cries Has the Night).
#Scene from pieces 1982 full
Vestron released it unrated on video, and the same lackluster full frame master was used for a Japanese laserdisc release. The gore content is fairly high but never convincing, with rubber torsos and latex mouths getting shredding by various sharp implements. Thanks to its profitable grass roots theatrical run ("You don't have to go to Texas for a chainsaw massacre!") and wide video distribution, Pieces became one of the more notorious splatter titles during the '80s with the predictable backlash by critics who took it way, way too seriously. Sleaze fans should also watch for Franco regular Jack Taylor as a know it all professor, who has some of the best lines when he stumbles onto one gory crime scene. The best way to enjoy Pieces is probably as an unintentional comedy, partially thanks to Sera's doe-eyed and wholly unsympathetic performance, while the endless parade of female nudity is too ludicrous to take seriously.
Even the catchy, pulsating library soundtrack for the English-language version liberally douses the film with excerpts of the scores by Stelvio Cipriani and Claudio Maria Cordio for Ring of Darkness and Absurd.
Plentiful suspects (including a chainsaw wielding groundsman played by Popeye's Bluto himself, Paul Smith!), endless police procedurals, a mysterious killer in black, and often naked women being terrorized in dark settings - yep, it's all right here. If there were any doubt about the giallo influence on Pieces, the hilarious motivations for the killer's activities (triggered with a head-scratching early scene involving a dense roller skater flying to her death in a big pane of glass, thus bringing his psychosis back to the surface) should quickly reveal its true intentions. Can our undercover sleuths discover the killer before he realizes their plan? And can anyone explain that lunatic final scene? Meanwhile young girls continue to fall prey to the killer, in settings ranging from a swimming pool to a water bed(!), all executed in graphic detail. The officer in charge, Lieutenant Bracken ( City of the Living Dead's Christopher George), enlists the aid of tennis player Mary (Lynda Day George) and unbelievably dippy, he-slut college student Kendall (Sera) to sniff around for clues on campus. Flash forward forty years later, as an idyllic Boston campus is being terrorized by a chainsaw killer who removes different body parts from his victims. The neighbors arrive with the police to find the house splattered with blood and the little boy hiding in the closet.
His mother bursts in and angrily chastises him, to which he responds by taking an axe to her head. In the obligatory prologue, set here in 1942, a young boy works on a jigsaw puzzle of a nude woman. Of course, the predictable yelps of protest quickly ensued over its supposedly misogynist depictions of college women being attacked by a jigsaw-happy lunatic, though in fact this Spanish-shot film owes far less to its slasher cohorts than to the genre's decade-earlier ancestors, the Italian gialli, which Pieces both imitates and nearly parodies to a completely absurd degree. Shuffled into coast-to-coast theaters at the height of slasher mania in the early '80s, it became an instant drive-in favorite with its prominent unrated status luring in huge audiences. Thankfully some of his anti-masterworks have ascended to bona fide cult status, and none reigns more supreme than the tasteless and relentlessly entertaining Pieces. While Spanish directors like Jess Franco certainly had their moments of hackwork, nobody else managed to hit the bottom of the barrel as consistently as the endearing Juan Piquer Simón who assaulted audiences with the likes of Cthulhu Mansion, Slugs, The Rift, and The Pod People. Grindhouse Releasing (Blu-ray & DVD) (US R0 NTSC), Arrow Films (Blu-ray & DVD) (UK RB/R0 HD/PAL) / WS (1.66:1) (16:9) Starring Christopher George, Ian Sera, Lynda Day George, Jack Taylor, Paul Smith
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