Pieces
(Diamond Region One DVD)
(1981)
review by Head Cheeze

Once in a blue moon, a film comes along that makes you sit back, take notice, and re-evaluate how you look at motion pictures. For example, Pieces proved to me that a film can be beyond mere criticism via words and comparison. Not only that; Pieces was so bad that, in comparison to it, all films that had previously scored a Total Shit rating seemed positively brilliant. So with that I introduce the Beyond Total Shit rating; a rating that encompasses all negative descriptive terms imaginable, as well as those yet to be created.

Pieces is the ridiculous story of a badly dubbed group of 40 year old Spanish actresses being slaughtered by a chainsaw wielding killer, who we see at the films outset as an innocent young boy who's reciting Humpty Dumpty while piecing together a pornographic puzzle. When the boy's mother freaks out at the discovery that her young son is a perfectly well-adjusted heterosexual male, he hacks her to bits with an axe and then, bathed in her blood, continues to piece together his puzzle until the cops come and he blames the killing on "big big man". Ya gotta love the cops that come to his house. They barge through the door and see a room COMPLETELY covered in blood and chunks of flesh and they respond as though they'd just stepped off of a lift onto the wrong floor. "My God. I've never SEEN so much blood" says one guy as he LOOKS UP AT THE BLOODLESS CEILING!!! "We'd better search the place." says the other as though this murder has ruined his lunch plans.

We flash forward 30 years to a college campus where Christopher George appears as a cop because he may have needed a boat payment. A maniac with a chainsaw has hacked up a bunch of girls in places like the school's indoor swimming pool, the middle of a park in broad daylight, and at the end of an impossibly long hallway down 11 flights of stairs and into the boiler room where an aerobics class student needs to go to use the bathroom. Of course, there's loads of gore, and a bit of naughty stuff, but none of that even comes close to making up for the absolute insult to one's intelligence that Pieces is. It's as if they didn't even try. No actors show a hint of ability, the film looks as if it were directed by a wedding videographer, and the gore effects are bafflingly bad. If Simon showed even an ounce of effort as a director, maybe some scenes would frighten a small child or a skittish pet, but every opportunity is sqaundered with either a long and tedious stalking scene or a childishly calculated attempt to make us jump out of our seat, when, in fact, it's all we can do to resist the urge to do so, if only just to get up and press the eject button on the DVD player. You know a film is bad when you can't watch it all in one sitting. You watch ten minutes, pause, go to the bathroom. Another twenty minutes: hmm, maybe make a snack. When you find yourself shampooing your rug instead of finishing the film, you know it's time to put this one to bed.

Wanna know who did it? So do I. I never finished it. I took it out just before they were about to reveal the killer's identity, and while I am 99.9 percent sure of who did it, I just didn't fucking care.

The DVD from Diamond retails for $6.99. I paid a buck for it. Wanna know how the transfer looks? Put a dirty fishtank in front of your TV. Now you know.

Here's something cool to do with a DVD like Pieces. Take it out of the player and place it on a dry, hard surface. A wooden floor will do nicely, or perhaps a cinder block. Next, get yourself something sharp. I used a pen knife. Then, proceed to gouge into the disc, scraping off as much of the silver you can before you then pick up the disc, and fling it, frisbee-like, into the nearest wall. Repeat until thoroughly shattered, then dispose of the Pieces (get it?! HA!) and use the empty case to stash your weed in.

Fuck this movie in it's own ass.