Pieces (DVD)

It's 1942 a young boy is playing peacefully I his bedroom. However, somehow it's a jigsaw of a naked woman he has and his mother is annoyed at discovering this and finding heaps of pornography hidden all over his bedroom. She demands that he goes and gets her the matches so she can burn it all but the weird child being a true blue porn fan instead gets an axe and brutally, albeit very unrealistically, kills his mother. He is then found in the blood ...
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Many years later and we have a random scene of a woman skating about on some University grounds before she crashes into two men carrying a mirror across a road. That scene seems pointless and is forgotten. But then another young woman is sitting on the lawn reading her book when she is disturbed by a man with a chainsaw cutting at the hedge. Annoyed she asks him will he be long and he rudely replies by cutting her head of and taking it away ... more

It's 1942 a young boy is playing peacefully I his bedroom. However, somehow it's a jigsaw of a naked woman he has and his mother is annoyed at discovering this and finding heaps of pornography hidden all over his bedroom. She demands that he goes and gets her the matches so she can burn it all but the weird child being a true blue porn fan instead gets an axe and brutally, albeit very unrealistically, kills his mother. He is then found in the blood covered room after cutting her into several pieces.

Many years later and we have a random scene of a woman skating about on some University grounds before she crashes into two men carrying a mirror across a road. That scene seems pointless and is forgotten. But then another young woman is sitting on the lawn reading her book when she is disturbed by a man with a chainsaw cutting at the hedge. Annoyed she asks him will he be long and he rudely replies by cutting her head of and taking it away with him. The university get the place in but they try to keep everything quiet and don't want to cause a panic. Later on another young girl is killed and her torso is taken and it discovered that a serial killer is loose on campus. With the help of a student whose girlfriend was murdered and by putting an officer (Lynda Day George) undercover as a tennis teacher they try to track down the killer.

The film is a cult classic 1982 slasher film. Directed by Spanish director Juan Piquer Simon and written by Italian Joe D'Amato and Dick Randall veterans of this B-movie horror genre. It starred Edmund Purdom as the headmaster of the school, a man trying to keep the whole thing under raps to maintain the good name of the school. Purdom acted prolifically in Italian B-movies and is an acceptable if not good actor, his performance in this film wasn't too obvious or too underplayed. The boy Kendall is very much the main character, played by an actor who doesn't seem to have done a whole except this, Ian Sera. His character was a little annoying to be honest, after his girlfriend is murdered he jokes with his friend he wasn't with her because he had managed to pull another girl. His girlfriend had just been killed with a chainsaw and he's cracking jokes! Not very realistic and it didn't make him in the least bit likable. The amount of reliance the police put on him was also far fetched and his flirtations with the undercover Lynda Day George were cringe worthy and annoying. Lynda Day George did not seem to be the greatest under cover cop in the world. She never really done any investigating and her over reaction to a dead corpse was both terrible acting and a bit embarrassing for her and put me right off her character. Her real life husband, Christopher George, played the main detective and this guy was rather good. Both of them starred in several similar films and some T.V. series such as Love Boat and Mission Impossible. Another character and possible suspect was this ridiculously huge groundskeeper who I thought looked a lot like Bluto from Popeye throughout and later found out was the guy who played Bluto in the Robin Williams Popeye film. At one point he is arrested and then released due to lack of evidence. He was arrested because he was discovered in a room with his hands on a chainsaw standing beside a heap of cut up human body parts, when confronted he then beat up several police men. What more evidence would you need?

The special effects were a bit hit and miss. A lot of the killing scenes looked quite fake and badly done. Especially the scene where the boy kills his mother. There was, however, one scene where you see a chainsaw going into flesh that looked really realistic and I found out they done this using the corpse of a pig. Makeup effects and mannequins of dead body parts etc were on the whole all right. Sometimes the blood was little redder than it should have been but it wasn't too bad. I don't think it was a particularly well directed film. Using slow motion in one of the killing scenes was really ineffective as they didn't have the special effects to back this up. There was one really weird scene were a karate guy just ran out of nowhere and attacked Lynda Day and then just sort of moseyed on, which was pretty random but apparently because the director was also making a kung fu film at the same time. There was also a reporter who seemed to be having a lot to do with the plot who was either cut out from the later scenes or just forgot about. A touch I did like was every time the killer killed someone and stole a body part you would afterwards see the killer's hands add the body part into the jigsaw from the beginning of the film.

I do like the way the film was also made to be a mystery film as well and you were always kept guessing and your suspicions thrown about a bit. As a mystery film it was quite good and as a horror film it did have a few make you jump scenes and a few truly disgusting looking dead body scenes. It's heralded as a cult classic and I can sort of see why it is quite a good slasher film but Joe D'Amato is renowned for cashing in on other people's ideas and this is very much a Texas Chainsaw Massacre cash-in. Like when some one creates a new idea for a video game you get a lot of crappier versions of it, like when Grand Theft Auto went big lesser games like Saints Row and The Getaway all used the idea. Personally I would just recommend you watch The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or any of its sequels, maybe even the remake first but if you've exhausted all of them there's no harm in checking this out as it is quite good.

Didn't like the soundtrack at all. I don't like horrible 80s synth film scores and the slow jazz as a girl undressed to get into the swimming pool was really garish.

I bought this in Woolworths for £1 and I think it was well worth it. If you just look at the front cover of this DVD you'd be forgiven for thinking that it is a new film with it's new cover art and then on the back you have these really old crappy quality screen shots. Well this film is made in 1982 and it is a B-movie so the film quality is a bit grainy but it's not distractingly so and it didn't bother me. The sound did seem all askew though it was as if it had been dubbed when I presume they made this film in English as it has English and American actors but it does look dubbed now and again.

DVD Extras

Trailers for:
Head Dead Cheerleader Cheerleader
Cradle of Fear
Hell Asylum
Escape From Afghanistan

''Certification'''

This film is understandably an 18 due to a lot of nudity and a lot of extreme violence.

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