Spooktober III Review 8: Pieces

Pieces (1982)
Juan Piquer Simon

"You'll be playing so much tennis it'll be coming out of your ears!"

I usually try to pick out a quote for my reviews that expresses something poignant about the film. Today's selection from the movie Pieces might lack poignancy, but it's a perfect example of what this movie has to offer in terms of coherence.

Pieces is a Spanish production (originally titled "Night of 1,000 Screams," which, what?) that was performed in English, I think. Or at least large chunks of it were. But maybe the accents were too heavy or the audio so poorly captured that they had to dub over the whole thing before release. So what we end up with is an unintentional What's Up Tiger Lily because there's no way for a normal, Earth born human to be ok with some of this dialogue in a non-absurdist comedy.

Characters float through the film like they're on powerful narcotics and vomit out incoherent dialogue that sounds like it was written by someone with advanced dementia. And it's hard to pin down what the problem is. Even Godzilla films have some sort of editorial process before they're dubbed into English, and the stories still make at least a little sense. With Pieces, the actors are clearly speaking English some of the time, but in other parts the dialogue doesn't match at all, which tells me that they rewrote some of the script for the dubbing. This turns a standard whodunit slasher story into an incomprehensible mess.


Here's a little sampler of the beautiful writing in Pieces:










Outstanding!

What's it about: The movie opens in the 1940's in "Boston USA" with a young boy putting together a jigsaw puzzle of a nude woman. His mother catches him and admonishes him for being a dirty sex pervert. He doesn't really like that, so he hacks her up with an axe. We jump to the modern day of 1982, and our nameless child has grown up to be one of only four old men in the film, and starts hacking apart coeds so that he can keep assembling his nude jigsaw puzzle.

What's interesting: First of all, this movie is awful. Truly abysmal. But that's not the worst sin in film. In fact, a lot of the awfulness is what makes Pieces so compelling. There's a chainsaw killer loose on a college campus, and the police only assign two (unbelievably incompetent) officers to the case. They stumble around the college, contaminating crime scenes, ignoring obvious suspects, and helping the school's dean keep the murders under wraps, even as more dismembered bodies appear.

As the corpses pile up, the cops get desperate and enact a plan to install two beautiful female undercover cops into the student body, which is a plan that only works if nobody talks about it. But it is common knowledge among, well, everybody, because the cops don't shut up about it. Then, when we're introduced to one of the undercover cops (the woman screaming bastard in the clip above), she says that there's only her, because it was a volunteer assignment and nobody else signed up.

So why, as a filmmaker, spend the time setting up that there will be two undercover cops only to have one? Is it because there's another cop installed somewhere on campus that even the audience doesn't know about? No, that's too smart. Is it because they wrote the script before hiring the actors? Maybe. That would be pretty dumb. Is it because this movie was made by 1,000 Spanish chimps typing at 1,000 Spanish typewriters? Absolutely.

Anyway, the undercover cop is made the school's new tennis coach (no word on what happened to the old one), so we get treated to the most exciting and skillful tennis match ever recorded on film:



That action leaves me breathless! But why is the tennis coach playing a match against a student? Is that how coaching works in Spain?

We're given two main suspects for the horrible chainsaw murders: the grizzled groundskeeper, who possesses and regularly uses a chainsaw, and the anatomy professor who routinely shows up at the scenes of the various crimes immediately after they happen, and contaminates them with only polite admonishment by the police. Instead of arresting, holding, or even questioning either of the suspects, the police just say things like "We're watching you," or "I'm going to question you later." And the bodies keep piling up.

Of course neither of the obvious suspects are the actual killer. We know this the whole time because the movie insists on implicating both of them in the most ham-fisted ways possible. They literally walk around the film with shifty eyes, acting like silent movie villains who just tied a young damsel to the train tracks. 

So who is the real killer? The only other character in the film who's old enough to have been a child in the 1940's (only he's developed a British accent since then): the crusty old dean of the college. This is obvious from the start, but the movie dangles it around until the last five minutes, as if this is some profound revelation.

The good news about Pieces is that the murders are excellent. Chainsaws buzz off heads, limbs, even torsos, and they are not shy about splashing gallons of blood around the set. And there's quite a body count. In an 89 minute movie, there's a solid kill every 10 minutes or so, which is a damn good ratio!

Other films I thought of: Any other slasher from the 1980's for the standard tropes. Troll 2 for the incoherence. Godzilla vs. The Smog Monster for the dubbing issues.

Miscellany: The climax of the film is really something. Our two idiot cops finally manage to solve the most obvious crime in history with help from a dorky college student protagonist, and with absolutely no assistance from the undercover officer/tennis coach other than her stumbling blindly into the killer's trap. 

The cops rush to the dean's office, shoot the door open, and find the tennis coach drugged but no dean. Without even searching the room, the cops run outside leaving our protagonist alone. The dean, who like a dimwitted three year old, was hiding behind the window drapes, bursts out and attacks the boy before being shot in the head by the cops who got back just in the nick of time. Whew. Crisis averted. Everybody's happy. 

There's a funny little scare when they discover the dean's corporeal jigsaw puzzle stuffed into an armoire, and it falls on the dorky protagonist, giving everyone a good laugh.

Oh, and then this happens:




Yes, that's the jigsaw puzzle corpse coming to life and violently castrating our protagonist in the last seconds of the film. 

Why? Well, I'm guessing the director saw Friday the 13th or Carrie and thought that's how big fancy Americans end their slasher pictures. So why is it the corpse of the murderer's victims doing this and not the "not really dead" body of the murderer himself? ¡Deja de hacer preguntas!

Recommendation: The only person I could reasonably recommend this movie to is myself. So if you're me, you should definitely see Pieces. And lucky for me, the whole thing is on YouTube!

Remarkably Awful