THURSDAY NIGHT HORROR! - 'Pieces' (1982)

So, there is a cheap plastic green skull with eyes that are supposed to light up when you walk by it in my house. The top of the skull is cut open so you can put candy in there for Halloween. Truth be told, it has never quite worked right and it seems to want to eerily go off whenever it wants to, sometimes randomly in the middle of the night.

It’s either malfunctioning or it truly is possessed by a sinister spirit… I’m not really sure at this point.

Anyway, instead of using it for candy, my roommate Courtney went out and found a ton of the more obscure movies or low-budget B movies, wrote them down on slips of paper and threw them into the demonic bowl. Ever so often, I’ll draw one of these movies and hand it to Courtney so he can confirm that it’s still available on whatever platform it should be on.

The key is that I don’t know what the movie is until the movie starts. Well, this past week, I drew a 1982 film that has a pretty healthy cult following among hardcore horror fans. The movie is called “Pieces” and it comes from Spanish director Juan Piquer Simón and the exploitation producer Dick Randall.

A mysterious serial killer stalks a group of young college students in "Pieces".

The movie is about a serial killer that is targeting young women at a Boston university while two cops practically deputize a student to figure out who it is doing all the killing. Meanwhile, every kill is accompanied by the killer putting together a puzzle of a naked woman with each of the “pieces” that he needs for his own devious purposes.

Make no mistake about it. This is a sleazy exploitation slasher with more than a few hints of giallo baked in for good measure. This is a movie that surges into the “it’s so bad, it’s good” territory with pride. I can understand why critics went after this movie upon its initial release because it goes all over the place even up to its random and crazy ass ending.

The movie has some decent slasher kills and Simón uses his extremely low budget pretty well even when some of the effects are obviously fake. Also, the movie was made with actors that spoke everything from English to Italian to Spanish, so the whole thing is dubbed, even the English actors.

There’s not much more to say about this movie, to be honest. The movie was developed by Randall and Simón took on what was ultimately a 30 page script that he had to expand, which included a crazy random scene where a character is attacked by a Bruce Lee clone named Bruce Le. It turns out that this ends up being a “martial arts professor” and Le was hired by Randall because… well, why not put him in this random ass movie.

I think it goes without saying that this movie is not for the mainstream. It has terribly bad dialogue, low production quality, and horrible acting… yet, I love this cult gem. This movie is for the true horror fans who love to dig for the lowest of the low. “Pieces” is pure slasher exploitation trash of the highest order.