Pieces (1983)
This nasty and nauseating little number is not only merely bad because of its extreme, foul violence, but it is also bad because it has no logic, coherence, or even a hint of style. Pieces is just a piece of splatter excrement.
The story begins in 1942 when a young boy takes an axe and chops up his mother. Why? Because she got angry over the fact that he was putting together a jigsaw puzzle that features the picture of a naked woman. So, yeah, mom had to go. But of course, when the police arrive, no one suspects the little tyke of being the killer.
Anyway, jump to the present, and suddenly a university is the site of some vicious killings. First, a girl is decapitated via chainsaw while studying....in broad daylight....in the middle of campus. Naturally there were no witnesses (?) and her head has vanished. What you would expect to happen is that the rest of the students would be horrified and, if not leaving the school entirely, would probably not want to go out anywhere alone. But, no. Not only does nothing change at this college but none of the other students even seem aware this vicious murder even happened.
Anyway, enter schlock god Christopher George (Graduation Day, The Gates of Hell, Mortuary) as the local detective hunting the killer. Who could it be? Well, as much as the movie would have you believe the killer is the creepy gardener, Paul Smith, the answer is actually very, very obvious. So, since the mystery element in Pieces doesn't work, what about the rest of it? It's just a nonsensical bloodbath. Every few moments another stupid girl goes somewhere alone and then gets sawed to...well...pieces. One girl goes swimming in the university pool in the middle of the afternoon, so of course she's completely alone, and even more believably she doesn't bother to turn on the lights. Another gets on an elevator with the killer, who's not only clad in black from head to toe with gloves, trenchcoat and hat, and hiding the chainsaw behind his back (yeah, right). And so on. We just get one laughable set up like these that results in scenes of women getting chainsawed with blood and guts being spewed out all over the screen.
The ultimate (and completely illogical) motive of the killer is to take certain pieces from his victims in order to sew them all together to form his own jigsaw-puzzle woman. Wouldn't just killing one woman be enough, after all, she'd have all her parts already together (or at the very least cutting up the parts and sewing them back together)? And why does the killer wait 40 years before going on this rampage? And why is it that none of the other female students realize that their classmates are getting murdered?
To speculate on the answers to these questions is giving Pieces much more credit than it deserves. After all, this would mean you would be putting much more thought into watching it than the creators put into making it. It's just a piece of garbage for those viewers who only care about the amount of blood spilt, and not to how or why.
