Pieces

It was only about two minutes into the movie, and a boy child had already been caught putting together the puzzle of a naked woman, so enraged by his mother's chastisement of his naughty behavior he buries a hatchet numerous times into her skull! This ought to tell you right away what  the viewer is in store for... About seven minutes later, on a school campus, in broad daylight, while about to trim the hedges, a killer takes a female student's head off (while she was studying on the nicely trimmed green grass) with a chainsaw as blood gushes out all over the place. This type of slasher is an example of absolute overkill. It is considered such a gratuitous riot because nothing is half-assed--you want buckets of gore, this film has it. A topless victim is introduced to stripper music and not only is she pulled out of the water but by a bug catcher you use to clean pools, her body parts hacked neatly together in a pile for discovery! You get another pile of dismembered corpse when an aerobics instructor is attacked by someone she knows and trusts  in an elevator, and a student is knife-stabbed over and over while caught on top of a water bed (!), the final blow a blade through the mouth. The straw that broke the camel's back is the final nasty bit of business involving a topless tennis student, having just showered (yes, the camera captures her entire back side), fleeing the killer in pursuit, cornered in a shower stall after trying to break throughout the locker room. She's cut in half, her upper torso found by a sickened Linda Day.

You want fucking strange, boy howdy, is Pieces your slasher movie. You often see random used as a viable/credible description of this movie as there are these weird scenes that make little sense in regards to the plot (what plot there is in this wacky movie), such as the aforementioned beheaded victim (prior to this) riding her skateboard down a sidewalk right into a couple of movers carrying a mirror, shattering the glass. A student asks a teacher about where her pectorals were located, and after he explains, you can hear her friends yucking it up.. The most notorious "you have got to be kidding me..." moment comes when a martial arts instructor pops out of the blue nearly karate kicking Mrs. Christopher George, Linda Day (portraying an undercover cop faking it as a tennis instructor; her character was once a famous tennis pro) into oblivion, falling forward, claiming it must have been something he ate, "Bad chop suey." Oy vey. Another moment of random has this kid wearing a hag mask frightening the film's little stud hero just for the hell of it.

Ah, the dialogue. To me, Pieces is such an Italian type horror movie as the dubbed verbiage often spoken between characters elicits plenty of giggles. The blunt ugliness of the dialogue, the hysterical vile exchanges that often occur: you just never know what to expect when characters carry on a conversation in an Italian movie. I have some doozies for examples here such as "The most beautiful thing in the world is smoking pot and fucking on the water bed at the same time." Oh, you like that line of dialogue? When a college kid delivers a note to a few student, learning that it has some worrisome news, he laments, "Oh, no, please tell me I'm not the deliverer of bad news. If I am I could just kill myself." When the other student tells him everything's okay, he responds, "Good. I'm too young to die." Only, in Pieces. Ha. How about "What if you gag me, I wouldn't make any noise then?" This comes from a horny girl who doesn't want ladies' man (chuckle, chuckle) Kendal (Ian Sera, who would typically play the nerd the girls wouldn't give the time a day, but leave it to Pieces to have him using his supposed charms (he just whistles and they come, this he informs his buddy) to woo girls on the campus)..

"Bastard!!!BAStard!!!BASTARD!!!!" Linda Day George's freakout here is just money. Nothing in the film signatures the absurdity of this movie, its utter depravity and crazy unpredictability, quite  like the final moment when geeky Lothario Kendal walks past the patchwork corpse created from the various body parts taken from each of the psychopath's victims and it "seizes" his pecker, squashing it as he cries out in mortal terror. This, folks, signifies that Pieces has no barometer; there was no line Juan Piquer Simón wasn't afraid to cross in the direction of this movie. This unbridled freedom to shock and wallop the viewer was here in full bloom.

The cast must have wondered what on earth, upon reflection, they were doing in this moron movie. Paul L Smith, Bluto of Altman's Popeye, is a possible suspect (he has this one expression, of "I will beat the shit out of you if you even try to mess with me! Back up and give me my space!", that gave me some laughs while giving other characters pause), Edmund Pardom, at this point in his career, couldn't escape this kind of trash (he was also in "Don't Open Til Christmas", another rather unpleasant slasher from Great Britain), a gentlemanly college president who reeks "guilty",  and Christopher George whose expected wise-ass attitude and prick smile are on display as the lead detective running out of patience and desperate to catch the killer leaving a pile of bloody,  mutilated corpses littering the college campus. Linda Day has the lady-in-peril part, and, not to be denied, suffers from the paralyzing drug drink that places her in a predicament when the nutcase singles out her feet as the final pieces to his body puzzle (the film returns time and again to the killer, with black gloves, coat, and hat putting together a naked woman puzzle from when he was a child).

This will remain a most memorable slasher for its misogynstic treatment and total annihilation of women, and all the eye-opening bizarre elements that combine to present quite a grisly, over-the-top puzzle, pieced together by a director more than willing to smack you upside the head.