There are bad movies, and then there are movies like Pieces. The kind of film that makes you feel like you’ve just walked into a basement filled with rusty tools, torn porn mags, and an unlicensed film crew trying to shoot a slasher without adult supervision. It’s sleazy, stupid, borderline incoherent — and yes, it has its defenders. But let’s be honest: just because a film is infamous doesn’t mean it’s good. And Pieces is a steaming pile of exploitation wrapped in a chainsaw blade.
“It’s exactly what you think it is,” the tagline proudly declares, like that’s a good thing. That’s like advertising a meal by saying, “It’s exactly what you think dog food tastes like.” You’ve been warned. And yet somehow, people still open their mouths.
The Plot (If You Can Call It That)
We open in Boston, 1942. A young boy gets caught assembling a nudie puzzle by his mom. She flips out — understandably, since it’s basically softcore porn in cardboard form. He responds by murdering her with an axe and a hacksaw and then hiding in a closet like it’s just another Tuesday. The cops show up and never find him.
Flash forward forty years, and we’re now on a college campus where nubile young women are getting hacked to bits by an unseen killer. There’s a chainsaw involved. There’s also a detective who’s so bad at his job he should be arrested for impersonating law enforcement. And a former tennis pro-turned-undercover cop who somehow thinks the best way to investigate murder is to hang around the victims in short shorts and flirt.
The killer’s identity is supposed to be a mystery. It isn’t. If you’ve seen any movie made before 1980 — or have a functioning frontal lobe — you’ll figure it out about twenty minutes in. That leaves you with 70 more minutes of bad acting, worse dubbing, and gore effects that look like they were purchased from a haunted house liquidation sale.
Chainsaw Massacre, Eurotrash Style
The kills are the only reason anyone watches Pieces, and even those manage to be a mixed bag. Sure, there’s blood. Limbs fly. Heads roll. But it’s all so clumsily executed (pun intended) that it plays more like a low-budget cooking show gone off the rails. The chainsaw never seems to cut anything. It just sort of buzzes near the actors while they writhe like they’re in a bad improv class.
One poor girl gets decapitated while studying on the grass in broad daylight — and no one notices. Not a scream. Not a whisper. Apparently, in Pieces University, public dismemberment is just another minor inconvenience, like forgetting your student ID.
The Acting: Somewhere Between Porn and Hostage Tape
Christopher George plays the detective, and bless him, he’s trying. You can practically see him straining to make sense of his dialogue, which was clearly written in Spanish, translated into Italian, then passed through Google Translate and carved into granite. His line readings are so wooden termites tried to eat the film print.
Lynda Day George, his real-life wife, plays the undercover tennis pro, and she delivers what might be the single greatest unintentional comedy moment in horror history. After discovering a corpse, she screams, “BASTARD!” Not once. Not twice. But over and over in a rage-fueled loop like she’s possessed by a soap opera demon.
“BASTARD! BASTARD! BASTARD! BASTAAAAARD!”
You could remix it into a club track. Actually, someone probably has.
The Logic? Left in the Dumpster
This movie doesn’t have plot holes. It has plot sinkholes. Gigantic, logic-devouring voids where the story should be. The police let a tennis coach lead an investigation. A woman is murdered in a locker room and her body is left for hours with no one noticing. There’s a kung fu professor who shows up out of nowhere, attacks our heroine, and then disappears with a shrug and a “must’ve been something I ate.”
That scene alone should get the film blacklisted from existence.
The Nudity: Gratuitous and Creepy
Let’s not pretend this film isn’t here to exploit. Every female character is either naked, about to be naked, or has already been chopped into cubes. Fulci was sleazy. Argento was stylish. But Pieces is just gross. Like it was directed by a guy who owns a van with no windows and thinks “casting couch” isn’t a metaphor.
There’s no eroticism here, no tension, just awkward T&A scenes thrown in with all the care of a toddler assembling a puzzle — which is ironic, because this whole movie is a puzzle of dismembered clichés.
The Ending (Spoiler: It’s Stupid)
After all the fakeouts, red herrings, and pointless detours, the killer is revealed — surprise! — to be the grown-up version of the puzzle-loving kid. He’s been killing women and using their body parts to recreate his beloved nudie puzzle.
Which is… actually kind of a cool idea.
But the movie doesn’t earn it. It rushes to the climax like it remembered it was late for something, then tacks on a final jump scare so absurd it makes Carrie look like high art. The reanimated corpse of the puzzle-woman reaches up and crushes a guy’s balls.
No, really.
That’s how it ends.
Not with a scream. Not with a twist. But with a bloody groin and a roll of credits.
Final Verdict: You Need a Shower After This One
People love Pieces because it’s so-bad-it’s-good. I get that. There’s a place for trash cinema. But let’s not pretend this is some misunderstood classic. It’s trash with zero nutritional value. It’s the cinematic equivalent of gas station sushi: thrilling in theory, disastrous in execution.
Watch it once, laugh at the gore, scream “BASTARD!” a few times, and move on. Just don’t try to defend it with phrases like “artful exploitation.” There’s nothing artful here. Just exploitation.
Final Score: 1.5 severed limbs out of 5.
Half a point for the chainsaw. One full point for Lynda Day George’s line delivery. Everything else can rot.
