Pieces (Spain, 1982)

Like Winterbeast earlier this month, Pieces came up in a conversation with Evan Dorkin. I think he’s actually mentioned it to me a few times, but the first may have been when I expressed my disappointment with Torso. While my memory is not to be trusted, he may have said that this was a more entertaining kind of giallo/slasher hybrid. And if that’s the case, he wasn’t wrong.

I’m surprised I never watched Pieces when it first came out. I spent a lot of the early eighties watching every horror film I could lay my hands on. That said, my interest was always more in supernatural horror than slashers, so it’s entirely possible I passed Pieces over in favour of something spooky. At least now, over 40 years on, I’m finally getting a chance to see what I’ve been missing.

Pieces is currently streaming on Shudder in the UK.

Synopsis

We open in Boston, in 1942, where young Tommy is putting together a jigsaw puzzle. His mother reacts violently when she sees that the puzzle is a picture of a naked women. Tommy, in response, grabs a handy axe and chops her up into, well, pieces. When the police arrive, he tells them a stranger killed her.

40 years on, there is a homicidal maniac stalking a college in Boston. His MO is to chop up women with a chainsaw, keeping body parts as souvenirs. He starts with the head and works progressively down in a pattern that should becomes obvious pretty quickly.

There is sort of a plot involving an undercover police detective posing as a tennis coach, a horny student who keeps hitting on her while assisting the investigation, a pushy reporter who is just asking for a bloody end, and lots of misdirection about the killer’s identity. Honestly, however, no one is watching Pieces for any of that. The story is only a framework to showcase gory kills, gratuitous nudity, and some genuinely puzzling attempts at comedy.

General Thoughts

Rather than trying to explain what makes Pieces such an odd film, I thought I’d just share some of the notes I jotted down while watching and let you witness my descent into disbelief.

“The most beautiful thing in the world is smoking pot and fucking on a waterbed at the same time.” They’re really trying to let us know who these students are with little messing around.
The police say the chainsaw murder is “an inside job”. WTF does that mean?
The overacting from the gardener is phenomenal for someone with almost no dialogue.
Does the killer have asthma? He should get that checked out.
That’s a full-size chainsaw casually hidden behind the killer’s back.
This whole thing is a cautionary tale about the danger of hiring too many middle-aged white men. If the campus staff had been a little more diverse we could have picked out the killer in no time.
Huh. Full-frontal male nudity. Not something we saw in many horror films at this time.
What the fuck? A random Southeast Asian martial artist in a tracksuit attacking the undercover officer? So he’s a professor of kung-fu with a terrible Chinese accent? And he attacked her because he ate bad chop suey? Such a weird, terrible scene.
The reporter walks into a room, sees a bloody chainsaw on a table, then turns around and walks back out again…
One of the students is randomly wandering around in a rubber fright mask. There’s no mention that this might be Halloween. Is he majoring in jump scares?
This latest victim only seemed to remember she should be frightened a few seconds after the chainsaw revved up. She kept appearing to lose interest again, even while getting murdered.
A close-up of victim pissing herself. There’s something you don’t see in many movies.
The resolution is a bit shit, but there is at least a nice, gross-out moment after it, followed by some sheer, abject lunacy.

Verdict

Pieces is the Platonic ideal of a certain kind of sleazy slasher film. This isn’t really a recommendation, merely an acknowledgement that it does exactly what it sets out to do. This is a gruesome, exploitative, and often silly piece of trash, but it’s far from unwatchable.

If it had been made even five years earlier, Pieces might be remembered as a particularly gory giallo (or should a Spanish giallo be called an amarillo? Please advise.) This is a lot slicker than most of the Italian cheapies of the time, however, displaying a technical competence that is distinctly at odds with the script.

While it’s not quite ironic, the writing in Pieces is knowing. It came out at an interesting midpoint in slasher cinema where the tropes were established enough to just nod to them but not so tired that they needed to be used with a wink. Certainly, a lot more is played for laughs here than, say, in the early Friday the 13th or Halloween films, but it’s not quite a Scream-style deconstruction.

Ultimately, I’m not sure I like Pieces, but it is cheesy and undemanding, with plenty of gore. The violent misogyny does become exhausting, although it’s not egregious for its time. Really, the thing that makes it stand out is just how damn odd it can be. And if that sounds like your idea of a good time, it probably will be.

The October Horror Movie Challenge

Please do join in and share your own thoughts with us about this or any other films as the month goes on. You can usually find us on BlueSky, Reddit, Discord, or lurking in the dark corners of your home.

If you would like to play along at home, my provisional selections are:

Heretic (USA, 2024)
The Sadness (Taiwan, 2021)
The Uninvited (USA, 1944)
The Lodge (UK/USA, 2019)
WolfCop (Canada, 2014)
Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (Czechoslovakia, 1970)
The Monkey (USA, 2025)
Sister Midnight (India/UK, 2024)
Roadgames (Australia, 1981)
Nightmare City (Italy, 1985)
Dangerous Animals (Australia, 2025)
Dead Talents Society (Taiwan, 2024)
Winterbeast (USA, 1992)
Byzantium (UK/Ireland, 2013)
The Ugly Stepsister (Norway, 2025)
A Page of Madness (Japan, 1926)
Heart Eyes (USA, 2025)
Grafted (New Zealand, 2024)
Arrebato (Spain, 1979)
Hatching (Finland, 2022)
Abigail (USA, 2024)
Ganja & Hess (USA, 1973)
The Devil’s Bath (Austria, 2025)
Pieces (Spain, 1982)
Infested (France, 2023)
Best Wishes to All (Japan, 2022)
A Cat in the Brain (Italy, 1990)
Enys Men (UK, 2022)
Creature From the Black Lagoon (USA, 1954)
Perewangan (Indonesia, 2024)
Bring Her Back (Australia, 2025)

A Final Note

If you have been enticed here by these posts, please do look around at some of our other film reviews. We also have a podcast, called The Good Friends of Jackson Elias, which occasionally covers horror films. If this appeals, you might want to check out some of the following episodes.