Pieces (1981)
                                       (aka:1000 Cries has the Night)
                                  review by Krug Stillo


SPOILERS ALERT!!!

Is this a very inane giallo/slasher with some of the most funniest dialogue,
acting and plot ever committed to celluloid I see before me? This is so bad
and cheesy I recommend any fan of the genre to watch it with a beer, someone
else with the same affection for these cheesy old Italian horror and a fresh
sense of humour.

The aforementioned weird plot? A little boy is beaten by his mother for
playing with a jigsaw puzzle of a nude woman. As retaliation the kid obtains
an axe and butchers his overprotective mum. Suddenly, it’s forty years later
and a black-leather gloved killer is on the loose, killing girls via
chainsaw and keeping various appendages. We have the cigar smoking detective
(Christopher George - City of the Living Dead, The Exterminator), the
suspicious tutor (Jack Taylor - Rings of Fear, Ninth Gate) and Willard, the
squinting gardener (Paul Smith - Crimewave, Popeye) and the undercover
celebrity (?) tennis player (Linda Day George, who also starred with her
late husband, Christopher in Mortuary…etc.) After a countless number (try
and spot them all and you’ll see what I mean) of silly lines and moments
(i.e. a woman being attacked by a mysterious schizophrenic Kung Foo
professor who excuses his violent outburst with the line ‘bad chop-suey’; a
gratuitous and unnecessary disco-aerobics scene; the murderer sneaking into
an elevator hiding a chainsaw behind his back and the victim doesn’t even
notice;) come the most preposterous ending imaginable.

It doesn’t take Hercule Poirot to pin point the killer who turns out to be
the Dean (Edmund Purdom - Absurd, Don’t Open ‘til Christmas). The motive? He
was collecting body parts of young girls to construct a real life jigsaw
version of the one his mother penalized him for putting together in the
pre-credits sequence.

From the director of Slugs, co-written by Joe D’Amato under another of his
pseudonyms, with a score resembling tracks from an Argento film and music
segments stolen from D’Amato’s own film, Absurd, Pieces is a sleazy slice of
cheese which is overstuffed with unintentional hilarity. It seems that this
strives to be a giallo, but resembles a silly stalk-an’-slash flick of the
period.