Sunday 14 June 2015

Pieces (1982, Juan Piquer Simon)


The Crazy World of Arthur Brown

A genius slice of latter-day giallo from notorious producer Dick Randall, "Pieces" is superb fun for anyone who remembers the illicit thrills of seeing the original "video nasties" when young in the '80s: ideally watched in Betamax whilst eating crisps and drinking Quattro. Yes, i am old.

Eurosleaze veteran Jack Taylor (of "Count Dracula", "Female Vampire", "Ghost Galleon" and "Dr Jekyll vs. the Werewolf") features here as a murder suspect university professor with the amusing name (for anyone who recalls late '60s one-hit wonders) of Arthur Brown. Someone is breaking campus rules by chainsawing nubile female students into bits, and assembling the pieces like a human jigsaw. Turns out that the perp had a bad experience in childhood involving his mother and a jigsaw, so he's assembling a new mother from chopped-up girlies.
All good sleazy fun, with some great moments (the "Fame" dancing scene, replete with '80s legwarmers, is hilarious). Good fun, to be enjoyed with a few cold beers and a sense of the perverse.

Also starring Christopher George, of "The Exterminator" fame, and an incongruous Edmund Purdom doing psycho like a true thesp

3 comments:

  1. Really if you cleaned up some of the gore, you'd have a typical episode of Criminal Minds and one of the top rated TV shows in the US. But while the poster promises a chainsaw, the screenshot shows a handsaw. I'm confused.

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  2. He may utilise multiple implements - in fact he probably does. Been a while since i watched it TBH. I've never seen Criminal Minds - my mother watches it and claims it's good, but then she watches some terrible crud as well.

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  3. Criminal Minds is ace, it really pushes the envelope of what you can get away with on US Network TV. Some pretty awesomely crazeeee serial killers have featured over the decade it's been on and the main cast are very likeable to balance the darkness out. I rate it second only to CSI (RIP) for getting my murder thrillz on telly. But don't watch the daytime repeats they routinely slash around five to ten minutes of violence and sadism out of the episodes to make them acceptable for the slot. Some repeats I have seen are completely incoherent if you haven't seen the original version.

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