She’s a very magnetic screen presence, and I was glad to see that she is still alive, even though I wish she hadn’t retired from the screen so long ago. Special mention here should go to Day, who was well known at the time of release for her role on TV’s Mission: Impossible at no point does she break character or the fourth wall, but she’s also obviously delighted to be participating in this production. The mystery, such as it is, isn’t resolved until the finale, although a set/location detail we see in the killer’s house is also present in another locale that is frequently seen, meaning that sharp-eyed viewers will figure out who the killer is before the halfway mark, but that makes the film no less fun. Just try to watch this scene and tell me that Pieces is meant to be taken seriously.Īs for the plot, it’s a fairly standard campus murder spree grindhouse-era flick, and there’s gruesomeness to spare here in addition to the comedy.
This film is comedy gold, and I loved every minute of it. That’s not even getting into the killer reconstructing his pornographic jigsaw puzzle in the film’s present while also assembling a jigsaw woman from his victims, the running gag of Bracken and his eternally unlit cigar, an extended aerobics class sequence, and even a woman skateboarding into a sheet of glass being carried across the street by two men. The dialogue syncing is awful, the lines themselves swing wildly from tonally dissonant purple prose to over-the-top shrieks and alien approximations of police procedural patter, and one of the murder victims pisses herself. Some of the scenes feel like the crew was in such a rush that they couldn’t afford the time to do more than one take.
#Pieces 1982 cast movie
There appears to be some contention among the fanbase as to whether or not the film was intended to be a comic film or a more straightforward example of schlock cinema it surely features the titillating nudity and gory gross-outs of other films from the latter genre (and equal opportunity nudity at that!), but I can’t imagine anyone involved in the making of the movie could have been under the impression they were making anything other than a humorous exercise in bad taste. Rounding out the cast is Lynda Day as Mary Riggs, a former tennis player turned undercover policewoman, although she ends up having to be saved by Kendall far more often than she should. I mean, Sera’s not an ugly guy, and his awful hair is one thing, but there are no attempts to hide the fact that he’s wearing lifts throughout the movie, and still stands a head shorter than almost everyone on screen. Kendall James (Ian Sera), the boyfriend of one of the victims, is also treated as a suspect initially, but is ultimately enlisted by Bracken as his on-campus liaison, leading to the younger man acting as the primary investigator of the murders despite the fact that he is even less suited to this role than he is to being the campus stud.
Smith, best known for playing Bluto opposite Robin Williams’s Popeye a few years earlier), reserved closeted anatomy professor Arthur Brown (Jack Taylor), and the helpful but absent minded Dean (Edmund Purdom). The suspects include surly groundskeeper Willard (Paul L. Forty years later, a rash of murders-by-chainsaw are perpetrated against a number of co-eds at an unnamed Boston university, and Detectives Bracken (Christopher George) and Holden (Frank Bana) are sent to investigate. Furiously, the boy’s mother tells him that she is going to burn this filth, but he returns to the room with an ax and a hacksaw and chops her into, well, pieces. In 1942, a ten year old boy is caught red-handed putting together a jigsaw puzzle featuring a nude pin-up. This movie is a camp masterpiece, and has set the bar high as my new standard for horror comedy. Shot largely in Spain and set in Boston, Pieces will leave you breathless, but from laughter, not fear.
#Pieces 1982 cast full
The film’s other tagline, “It’s exactly what you think it is,” is also accurate– Pieces is a solidly hilarious and gratuitously gory flick about a campus killer who murders women with a chainsaw, full of ridiculous and unrealistic dialogue that would give a more modern postmodern horror spoof a run for its money. “You don’t have to go to Texas for a chainsaw massacre” declares one of the taglines for 1982’s exploitation horror film Pieces, although you would have had to be in Austin this week to see the screening of the 35mm master print, cobbled together by Grindhouse Releasing from the extant copies of the film (and from which their remastered 2008 DVD was produced).