spencergrande6 Pieces both did and did not live up to its reputation. That's fair to say of many things with a certain anticipation coming into them. I could see what people fell in love with here, but it didn't win me over. There's graphic nastiness and it's great and all and the plot is all red herrings and nonsense which can be entertaining. Yet, unlike a surreal giallo or a nasty slasher, it lies flatly in between a bunch of tones. There's not quite enough imaginative gore (there's plenty but it's straightforward in its application) to enjoy is as a piece of visceral entertainment, not enough crazy plot to enjoy it as comedy - it has some interesting eccentric characters and a nasty enough central gimmick but it's good not great in the slasher pantheon.

Sam Panico When the general public thinks of a slasher film with no redeeming value whatsoever, chances are they're thinking about this movie. It is at the same time the best and worst film you've ever watched. But more importantly, it is never ever boring.Back in 1942, a young boy named Timmy was putting together a jigsaw puzzle of a naked woman. His mother, understandably, is upset and demands he get a garbage bag to throw the puzzle away. Instead, he came back with an axe to her head and then cut her up with a hacksaw. He hides in a closet and the police send him to live with his aunt, as they believe whoever killed his mother had escaped.This all happens within the first minute of this movie. Yes, Pieces packs more gore and strangeness into sixty records than most movies do in ninety minutes.Forty years later, a man in black opens a box that has the bloody clothing of Timmy's mom and a photograph of her. He opens the nude jigsaw puzzle, which is covered in blood and begins to play with it. I hope he has all the pieces! This is why we never buy old puzzles at the thrift store.Cut to (no pun intended) a girl studying outside, who gets her head chopped off by a chainsaw and stolen. Lt. Bracken (Christopher George, Day of the Animals, City of the Living Dead) and Sgt. Holden (Frank Braña, Yellow Hair and the Fortress of Gold, If You Shoot…You Live, God Forgives…I Don't!) start their investigation, meeting the dean (Edmund Purdom, Absurd, 2019: After the Fall of New York) and anatomy Professor Brown (Jack Taylor, Horror of the Zombies, Conan the Barbarian). Rounding out our suspects would be Willard (Paul Smith, Bluto from Altman's Popeye, one of the first movies that I remember hating as a child), a groundskeeper who is using a chainsaw.Then, in the library, Kendall gets a note from a girl, telling him to come see her at the pool. The killer reads the note first and chainsaws the girl to, well, pieces. Willard is arrested and the detectives find the chainsaw and the girl's body…except for her torso (no, not 1973's Torso).Read more at http://bit.ly/2zuwUTs

thelastblogontheleft This movie is the best kind of hot mess cult classic. It has such an amazing juxtaposition of completely absurd, out-of-place dialogue, mediocre acting, and subpar dubbing along with some truly chilling moments and AWESOME murders that you can't help but love it.The movie opens with a young boy being caught and subsequently berated by his mother for playing with a pornographic puzzle (I had no idea such a thing existed so thank you for that). But don't worry, he kills her with an axe and then feigns innocence when the police arrive so he is sent off to live with his aunt. Fast forward 40 years and his lust for killing is still there, only now he stalks college co-eds and keeps pieces of their bodies to assemble his own perfect woman (I'm really not sure what his end goal is there).It's a pretty straight forward slasher/mystery, but the red herrings that are thrown at you are just laughably obvious. Like I'm really going to believe that the sketchy gardener who has keys to everything on campus (Paul L. Smith) is the actual killer? Or the anatomy professor (Jack Taylor, though I wish it could have been Thomas Lennon aka Lieutenant Dangle from Reno 911) who is clearly socially stunted and has working knowledge of how to disassemble a body? But it doesn't matter because this movie is FUN.You have these moments of legitimately high tension — like the killer following the girl as she unsuspectingly dances down the hallway and then trapping her in the elevator — and then, shortly after, probably the best known moment of ridiculousness when a completely random dude jumps out of the bushes and scares Kendall (Ian Sera) as he is investigating with some pretty sweet kung fu moves.There's god awful acting and some of the cheesiest, stiffest lines ever… but you have brilliant killings like the female reporter being slashed on the water bed and then flailing in the bloody water in slow motion before he stabs her through the back of the head (but, naturally, you can see the fake knife bend in the most obvious way in the pulled back shot). Or the girl with her legs chainsawed off in the corner of locker room (definitely one of the most brutal scenes I've witnessed).I thought the music (done by Stelvio Cipriani and Carlo Maria Cordio) was a standout, too, though some moments were eerily reminiscent of The Blood Stained Shadow, which Cipriani also scored.But the TRUE gem of this movie is the ending. Not only do we have the very obvious twist when we find out the killer, but the last two bits of surprise are just THE BEST. I was already loving it but with the closing scene I was LITERALLY clapping at the TV as the credits rolled. Worth it for that alone, trust me.

PeterMitchell-506-564364 Here's a bloody, and I mean bloody chainsaw flick, this makes the Texas Chainsaw look like pumped versions of The Sound of Music. Take the warning on the front cover seriously before watching the dispatches of torso's whatever that follow. A little boy caught by his mother with a nude jigsaw becomes killer, ending her in just the start of the carnage that follows. Cut many many years later, to the eighties on a school campus, we have a nut, with a chainsaw, cutting his way through nubile bodies to create his own human jigsaw. Siuck f..k. Christopher George, a detective on the case, sends a woman, undercover, who's trained in Karate to catch this madman, where it's not easy. We have one suspect, Midnight Express's Paul Smith as a caretaker, bearing a chainsaw. Could he be the one. A student on campus helps George, in his investigation, going through mugsheets, whatever. This bright intellectual really has his work cut out for him, where he thinks this work is kind of cool. Meanwhile, the chainsaw nut out there is still making the cut. One girl literally wets herself in terror while getting it in the elevator. As an Italian cheapie classic, Pieces is one horror fan's guilty pleasure, with a not so happy ending for an innocent party. If you want blood and hot bodies, don't pass this one up. I'd option for this over the Texas Chainsaw Massacres anyday. The Asian jogger who went to attack our undercover hottie, who outwits him, then takes off again as though everything's cool. What the hell was that about.