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Dis­cov­er the stom­ach-turn­ing thrills of this infa­mous 80s slasher

27 Mar 2017

Words by Anton Bitel

Man in a checked shirt and trousers sitting on a patterned rug, looking distressed with blood on his face and body.
Man in a checked shirt and trousers sitting on a patterned rug, looking distressed with blood on his face and body.
Juan Piquer Simón’s Pieces is among the gori­est films ever made.

Boston, 1942. With Father off serv­ing in Europe, Moth­er – in her pret­ty blue dress – is hor­ri­fied to find lit­tle Tim­my Reston assem­bling a jig­saw puz­zle depict­ing the image of a nude pin-up girl. You dirty lit­tle rat, play­ing with filth like this – just like your father!” she yells, slap­ping the 10-year-old hard in the face. I’ll kill you if I ever find stuff in the house like that again.” Tim­my then takes an axe to his moth­er, chop­ping her into pieces. When the police arrive, they assume it was the work of an intrud­er, and send Tim­my off to live with his aunt.

With most of its action set 40 years lat­er, this open­ing sequence to Juan Piquer Simón’s Pieces (aka Mil Gri­tos Tiene la Noche, 1000 screams in the night’) is also a pri­mal scene, estab­lish­ing the dis­turbed psy­che of a father­less and sex­u­al­ly repressed boy who will now, as an adult, kill and kill again. Events unfold on a uni­ver­si­ty cam­pus, as a killer seri­al­ly slices his way through the stu­dent body with a chain­saw, remov­ing from each a dif­fer­ent part.

As the killer method­i­cal­ly assem­bles an ide­alised mix-and-match corpse to recre­ate in flesh both his own moth­er and the woman depict­ed on his blood-spat­tered jig­saw puz­zle, jad­ed Lieu­tenant Brack­en (Christo­pher George), his assis­tant Sergeant Hold­en (Frank Braña) and under­cov­er offi­cer Mary Rig­gs (Lin­da Day) are also try­ing to piece togeth­er a pro­file of the perp from both clues and red her­rings. On hand to help is Kendall James (Ian Sera) who, putting the stud in stu­dent, is him­self some­thing of a ladykiller.

And as the dis­mem­bered bod­ies pile up, there is a race to deter­mine whether the mur­der­er is crazy-eyed, chain­saw-lov­ing groundskeep­er Willard (Paul Smith), sus­pi­cious mous­tache-twirling anato­my pro­fes­sor Arthur Brown (Jack Tay­lor, a reg­u­lar in the films of Jésus Fran­co) or the mild-man­nered Dean him­self (Edmund Pur­dom, chan­nel­ing his best Gre­go­ry Peck).

In keep­ing with the con­ven­tions of 80s slash­er movies, there is plen­ty of tits and ass on dis­play here for the male gaze of the killer (which the view­er is forced to share) – although also, refresh­ing­ly, there is some male nudi­ty too, first exposed to the cam­era, and then hilar­i­ous­ly con­cealed by a well-placed flow­er­pot. And while it is most­ly female flesh that is dis­sect­ed by the film’s voyeuris­tic psy­cho, in the final scene a very dif­fer­ent kind of killer goes right for the balls, restor­ing the gen­der imbalance.

If all this sounds like stan­dard giallo/​slash­er fare – and it has ele­ments from both – in fact Simón con­structs his film in much the way that the killer recre­ates his puz­zle: tak­ing a bit from here, a bit from there, and stitch­ing all these dis­parate pieces into a mon­strous hybrid. For here we also have cam­pus com­e­dy, lengthy vogu­ish aer­o­bics sequences, and even an entire­ly gra­tu­itous kung fu scene (with actor Bruce Le doing his very best impres­sion of his near name­sake) – and in the end, when the who­dun­nit has been resolved, there is a coda which once again shifts the genre, this time towards mon­ster movie territory.

With its rough-hewn com­pos­ite iden­ti­ty, Pieces proves hard to pin down. It is set in Boston but most­ly shot in Madrid; the dia­logue in its Eng­lish-lan­guage ver­sion is always man­nered and unnat­ur­al; its dub­bing is shril­ly over­act­ed and hyper­re­al. All of this con­tributes to the film’s elu­sive, intan­gi­ble qual­i­ty, as famil­iar tropes are remixed in unex­pect­ed com­bi­na­tions and defa­mil­iarised through idio­syn­crat­ic gestures.

Though it has since gained a cult fol­low­ing, when it was first released Pieces bare­ly reg­is­tered with audi­ences, who were per­haps mes­merised by its bril­liant­ly tawdry poster tagline (‘It’s exact­ly what you think it is!’) into imag­in­ing they were watch­ing bog-stan­dard slash­er sleaze. On the con­trary, Pieces is sev­er­al strange slices of scabrous sen­sa­tion­al­ism whose whole is far more than the sum of its parts.

Pieces is released by Arrow in a Deluxe Lim­it­ed Edi­tion with brand new 4K trans­fer on 27 March.

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