Review — Pieces 1982

One of my ALL TIME favourite pieces of 80s horror! Now, of course, the acting is not good, and the plot is pretty loose, but that’s generally to be expected of horrors from this era so I just look right past that and focus rather on the elements that, to me, are more important in a slasher, and of course that would be the kill scenes, the gore and, since this film has an awesome one, the ending.
“Pieces” has all the makings of a classic 80’s slasher, but I suppose, for its time, it is pretty brutal (notice the warning on the poster?) and I don’t think viewers were ready for something like this back then. And I think that by the time the subject matter of the movie became less shocking/more acceptable, the standards of film-making had gone up and now it was the silly story and the awful acting which were intolerable… This probably accounts for how underrated this film ended up becoming…but I still love it!!
“Pieces” begins in 1942 with a young boy putting together a puzzle…of a naked lady. His mother catches him and is horrified and furious…so he attacks/murders her with an axe…then hides in the closet and when the scene is discovered he, convincingly enough, plays the part of the traumatized witness. 40 years later, there is a killer on the loose at a college campus, picking off female students, cutting them up with a chainsaw, and always taking a ‘piece’ with him.
This movie is great for lovers of horror, perhaps not so great for movie fans, but the horror really is superb. The killing scenes are bold and brutal and bloody; both the opening and ending scenes are shocking and gritty and honestly I just found the whole premise and underlying story to be just so COOL, I just really enjoyed this one.