{"id":38174,"date":"2022-11-21T14:28:59","date_gmt":"2022-11-21T19:28:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/?p=38174"},"modified":"2023-01-03T11:23:00","modified_gmt":"2023-01-03T16:23:00","slug":"bad-movie-monday-pieces-1982","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/2022\/11\/21\/bad-movie-monday-pieces-1982\/","title":{"rendered":"BAD MOVIE MONDAY: PIECES (1982)"},"content":{"rendered":"

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The word of the day, when choosing something for my friends and I to watch on BAD MOVIE MONDAY, has almost always been “agony”. However, on the particular night that we watched this movie I thought it’d probably healthier for their collective sanity to at least try<\/em> to pick something that wasn’t gut wrenchingly awful. Hence, we watched 1982\u2019s PIECES. Partially because it has Christopher George in it, who’s sort of become my own personal bad movie mascot, and also because no one else but me in the group had watched it and I thought it was a rather important film. It’s a quirky mix of Italian Giallo and American Slasher movie tropes, even though the film is Spanish. It\u2019s also not<\/em> a bad movie in any way. Let me be very clear about that. However, it has enough bonkers moments and questionable logic to be shown on a \u201cbad\u201d movie night.
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\nQuick Recap! When COVID shut down everything in early 2020, I started an online bad movie night get-together with some friends that we eventually dubbed \u201cBad Movie Monday\u201d. The premise was simple: We\u2019d torture each other every Monday with the worst trash we could find, tell a few jokes, cheer each other up, and in the process maybe discover some weird obscure cinema that we might never have seen any other way. This series of reviews will feature highlights of those night so you can all share in the fun and maybe get some ideas for your own movie night.<\/em><\/p>\n

PIECES stars Christopher George, Lynda Day George, Paul L. Smith and Edmund Purdom. It was directed by Juan Piquer Sim\u00f3n, who isn’t as well-known as other \u201cvideo nasty\u201d directors such as Joe D\u2019Amato or Lucio Fulci for example, but the guy had a lot of style. It’s such an absurd movie that you often find yourself laughing at the contrivances, but it’s also so well made that you never laugh at the film itself. To me, it’s the perfect combination of terrible and beautiful, exploitation and art.<\/p>\n

This movie is so epic that it has not one, but TWO, of the greatest taglines in all of cinematic history: \u201cPieces\u2026 It\u2019s exactly what you think it is.\u201d and \u201cYou don\u2019t have to go to Texas for a Chainsaw Massacre.\u201d I have to say that these taglines are also surprisingly accurate. This film has more chainsaw kills than the first three Texas Chainsaw Massacres combined. So that\u2019s cool! And, yeah, it\u2019s exactly<\/em> what you think it is. Chainsaws, Gore, Tits. That\u2019s what you came for and that\u2019s what you\u2019re gonna get. Sure it\u2019s ridiculous and vulgar, but are you really watching a movie called PIECES expecting it to be anything else? It’s fast paced, the blood and guts look very decent, you laugh and smile a lot, and it’s not horribly unpleasant to watch. That’s all I really want from my “bad” movies.<\/p>\n

The high point is the acting. Christopher George and his wife Lynda Day George were working actors who never phoned in a performance. They always gave the audience its money\u2019s worth. Edmund Purdom is also always great. He was a British actor who left Hollywood in the early sixties and became a B-movie regular in Italian cinema. The movies he made are of WILDLY varying quality, be warned, but he also always brought his A-game to most of the stuff he did. Then there\u2019s Paul L. Smith who is\u2026 well\u2026 there. Don\u2019t get me wrong, I like him a lot. I love his stuff. It\u2019s just that he doesn\u2019t have much to do here except try to trick the audience into thinking he\u2019s the killer.<\/p>\n

So what’s the back of the VHS tape say?<\/p>\n

PIECES… It’s exactly what you think it is.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The year is 1941. A young boy is assembling a jigsaw puzzle of a nude woman, when his mother enters in a rage and tells him to throw the puzzle out. Instead he returns with an ax and hacks his mother to death, tricking the police into a believing a maniac had killed her. Forty years later at a Boston college, the terror really begins. A chainsaw-wielding madman is roaming the campus collecting pieces of beautiful co-eds for a ghastly human puzzle he is assembling – and the police haven’t a clue to the crazed killer’s identity.<\/p>\n

CHRISTOPHER GEORGE (Mortuary) stars in this horrifying adventure into madness, hysteria and bone-chilling brutality.<\/strong><\/p>\n

As far as 1980s era VHS tape synopsis\u2019 go, this one is very accurate and helpful for once. No BS, no outlandish lies about what you\u2019re going to see. I appreciate that.<\/p>\n

Alright! Onto my favorite part of the review where I list ten things that went through my head as I watched the movie:<\/p>\n

#1 Apparently, murder is the natural consequence of having put together a puzzle. I\u2019d hate to be at that kid\u2019s house when he was playing Hungry Hungry Hippos.
\n#2 The actress who plays the mom in this movie\u2019s prologue saw Faye Dunaway in MOMMIE DEAREST and thought “I can play crazier!”
\n#3 There\u2019s a scene early on where a girl is skateboarding and stupidly runs into a giant mirror that we\u2019re supposed to interpret as the trigger that sets our killer off. Except it\u2019s so random and out of place that it looks like something from another movie.
\n#4 Paul L. Smith’s character isn’t called \u201cRed Herring\u201d but he ought to be. I don\u2019t care how much he polishes his chainsaw in a sinister way. He is not the killer. We literally SEE the killer about ten minutes into the movie and he\u2019s not 6\u20194\u201d and 320lbs. One of this movie\u2019s more charming quirks is that it\u2019s kind of shit at being a mystery.
\n#5 No one notices a chainsaw if you hide it behind your back.
\n#6 With one line: \u201cBastard! BASSSSSSSTARRRRRD!!!\u201d Linda Day George became a legend. Well, a legend to me anyway. She figured that if she was going to be in a terrible movie reciting terrible dialogue she might as well try to be the best damn thing in the movie. She succeeded.
\n#7 According to this movie, Bad Chop Suey will make you go crazy and think you know Karate. I cannot vouch for the accuracy of this medical advice however.
\n#8 Running away from a man lumbering awkwardly under the weight of a heavy chainsaw is nigh impossible.
\n#9 Loud music can cover up the sound of screaming and chainsaws. PEOPLE WILL BARELY NOTICE WHAT\u2019S HAPPENING.
\n#10 The \u201ctwist\u201d ending is utter madness. In a movie that is populated with scenes that come out of nowhere with no explanation, this tops it all off like a delicious cherry atop a creamy sundae.<\/p>\n

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The word of the day, when choosing something for my friends and I to watch on BAD MOVIE MONDAY, has almost always been “agony”. However, on the particular night that we watched this movie I thought it’d probably healthier for their collective sanity to at least try to pick something that wasn’t gut wrenchingly awful. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3070,12],"tags":[2951,411,950],"class_list":["post-38174","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-badmoviemonday","category-movie-reviews","tag-bad-movie-monday","tag-giallo","tag-slasher"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38174","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38174"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38174\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":38183,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38174\/revisions\/38183"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38174"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38174"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38174"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}