A young boy is caught by his mom working on a nudie jigsaw puzzle. She threatens to burn all the porn she finds in his room and asks him to get a trash bag; he returns with an ax and chops her to pieces, digging out a saw for those extra-pesky bones. Then he returns to his puzzle.
And so begins Spanish auteur Juan Piquer Simón’s Pieces, an unintentionally hilarious slasher that manages to make even its excessive gore scenes exceedingly comical.
Forty years later, things are pretty idyllic at the college campus, where the students demonstrate their higher education through such lines as, “The most beautiful thing in the world is smoking pot and fucking on the waterbed at the same time!” One fine morning, a girl skateboards through a plate glass window — a bravura scene, sure, but it has nothing to do with the story, which has female college students who are quick to get naked for the camera start dying at the whirring blade of a yellow chainsaw.
Who’s the culprit? Is it the burly groundskeeper? The university’s anatomy professor? The mousy British dean? The killer is mostly cloaked in shadows or shot from the ankles down, yet the gore is indeed gory, with limbs and noggins lopped off before your very eyes. One girl pisses herself before her torso gets cut in two. Following each kill, the murderer retreats to adding more pieces of that nudie puzzle, working his way down from the top. (And here I was always taught to the do the borders first and work inward.)
It all leads up to the expected climax, wherein the killer is shot just in the nick of time, before he can kill the hero (Pod People’s Ian Sera, playing a college student who snares an unbelievable amount of chicks, despite looking like Screech from TV’s Saved by the Bell). But then something unexpected happens that had me rolling in hysterics. And then that’s followed up by a final shot that also was greeted with unbelievable laughter, even if it makes no sense. If only all those Friday the 13th sequels had been like this. —Rod Lott