“Pieces” Of Piquer…Or, The Glorious Memories Of A Misspent Youth

1983...

For horror fans at least, it was a time dominated by Stephen King, with such King adaptations as John Carpenter's Christine and Lewis Teague's Cujo seeing release within mere months of each other. So, with such high-class terror from the era to choose from, why do I continue to have such affection for Spanish director Juan Piquer Simón's unabashedly bizarre, insanely funny '83 horror opus Pieces?  

I'll be the first to admit that part of the reason is just sheer nostalgia - Piquer Simón's zero-budget sleaze fest was one of the first "No One Under 17 Admitted" movies I ever witnessed in its big screen glory without an older buddy (or slacker theater employee) helping me slip through the multiplex doors.

But nostalgia aside, I believe there's something else at work here that keeps me coming back. Simply put, while the director may have intended to create a stylish tribute to the slasher genre, the final result is so surreal,so darkly comic, so eager to offend, and so contradictory that the movie compares more favorably with the work of Paul Morrissey (especially Andy Warhol's Frankensteinand Andy Warhol's Dracula) than the films of Carpenter and Teague.

The story is admittedly nothing too original - as the press notes to Grindhouse Releasing's recently released, lavish two-disc restoration of Pieces inform us, "a psychotic killer is stalking a Boston campus, brutally slaughtering college coeds, collecting the body parts of each victim." All this mayhem is committed with the goal of creating the ultimate human jigsaw puzzle (not surprisingly, Jigsaw was the movie's working title, while the Spanish title remained the self-consciously artsy Mil Gritos Tiene La Noche - "A Thousand Cries Has The Night"). 

The first thing you'll notice once you get past the multiple aliases is that the line-up of talent behind the camera amounts to a veritable "who's who" of soft and hardcore infamy. The screenplay's several co-writers include Dick Randall (creator of various kung fu and softcore Emmanuelle flicks) and the late Joe D'Amato (director of the legendary "Porno Holocaust" and creator of many of Rocco Siffredi's early movies). And producer Steve Minasian was hardly a stranger to the genre either, having produced both Last House On The Left and the original Friday the 13^th (a poster for the latter can actually be glimpsed on a coed's wall at one point in the film). 

On hand to make sure everything goes according to plan in the fine acting department is Christopher George, a one time Golden Globe nominee (for TV's The Rat Patrol) who'd spent the earlier part of his career working in A-list productions with the likes of John Wayne and Robert Mitchum before slumming his way through tawdry European productions like Lucio Fulci's City Of The Living Dead. As the cop investigating the campus killings, George discovers a plethora of possible suspects, including a monstrous groundskeeper (cult icon Paul Smith from Robert Altman's Popeye, looking and acting like a giant, demented baby); flamboyantly gay anatomy professor Jack Taylor (prissy star of such Jess Franco classics as Eugenie and Succubus); and a shady and endlessly argumentative dean (former Hollywood leading man Edmund Purdom).

Add the lovely Lynda Day (star of the original Mission: Impossible and Christopher George's wife) and several beguiling, twenty-something Spanish beauties (all leaping at chance to perform full-frontal nudity for Piquer Simón's lens), and you've got one of the strangest rogue's galleries in the history of the genre.

And while the true identity of the killer is painfully evident within the movie's first fifteen minutes, getting there is always half of the fun, and this is where Grindhouse Releasing's edition of Pieces really shines. Audio options allow you to watch the movie with the original Spanish soundtrack (with English subtitles if desired). This soundtrack also features the haunting original score by composer Librado Pastor, never before heard in an American edition of the movie.  Among the many other special features, the second disc also includes a lengthy, all-new video interview with Juan Piquer Simón.

Seeing the film now, as properly restored and presented by the good people over at GR, I'm tempted to stop beating myself up so badly for loving this delightfully decadent excursion into bad taste and high camp. After all, if the liner notes are to be believed, I've got a bloodbrother in Hostel director Eli Roth, who calls it "One of my top horror films of all time. It has everything you could possibly want. Full-on chainsaw violence, absurd amounts of nudity, and the greatest ending in horror history. Pieces is a masterpiece of early 80's sleaze."

You'll hear no argument from me, Eli. - Daniel M