Pieces (J. Piquer Simon, 1982)

A bloody, messy slasher about a killer with a jigsaw kink

One of the recurring motifs employed throughout the 1982 horror movie Pieces is a jigsaw puzzle.

At the beginning of the film, it’s a nudie pinup jigsaw that young Timmy is ogling over before being reprimanded by his mother, whom he immediately murders in retaliation.

From there on out, there are all manner of jigsaw puzzle pieces splattered liberally throughout the movie: literal jigsaws drenched in blood, disassembled and reassembled body parts, and numerous smashed mirrors.

The recurring use of such imagery often feels rather little heavy-handed, but if the film itself can employ such overt symbolism so unrelentingly, then I feel more than permitted to lean on this apt analogy for the film as a whole:

Pieces feels like a jigsaw puzzle in which all the pieces of the picture are there, but they don’t fit together as perfectly as they should. Someone has used force to join them into place. For all intents and purposes, yes, the puzzle has been completed, but it’s not exactly correct.

Reading other people’s reviews of Pieces, the film has been described as “a lurid, gory, grindhouse extravaganza,” “bad sleeze with terrible acting,” “a bargain basement abomination,” “a great 80s slasher,” and “disturbing, hilarious, bad, and good all at once.”

All of the above are correct.

Pieces is a giallo-esque whodunit slasher that, for many reasons, shouldn’t work. But it does. It’s not the crème de la crème of the cinematic horror canon, but it is engrossingly entertaining. It’s out-and-out exploitation but at times it feels like it has arthouse ambitions... of which it's embarrassed.

So a messy, jumble of a movie. And yet… it’s not a bad film.

The main plot of Pieces picks up 40 years after little Timmy killed his mother. He brutally butchered her (the visceral opposite of putting a puzzle together) and then hid in the closet when the police arrived, in order to pass as a victim himself.

In the time since then, he’s apparently been quietly reabsorbed into society, until a fatal accident in which an out-of-control roller-skater is shredded to pieces after crashing into a large plate mirror being carried across the street (a bravado sequence — one of several that elevates the film above the “trash cinema” designation).

Apparently a witness to this accident, it triggers something in him that spurs him to return to his homicidal ways, brutally slaying a number of female coeds.

But who did Timmy grow up to become? The queer anatomy professor, perhaps, or maybe the grotesquely animalistic gardener? Or someone else?

As the killings continue (and, as another review points out “people are fully aware that a homicidal maniac is on the loose yet loiter in dark buildings, go for midnight swims in gymnasiums, and take slow walks down dimly lit streets”) the police begin their leisurely investigation, including deputizing the boyfriend of one of the victims and partnering him up with a former tennis pro-cum-policewoman who goes “undercover” at the university despite everyone being fully aware that she’s a policewoman.

So much about Pieces is stupid stupid stupid.

It’s not that it doesn’t make sense or that it shouldn’t, it’s just someone is forcing two pieces together that shouldn’t fit, but they’re determined to make them so. But you go with it, because you want to be entertained, and so, in the end, it works.

The puzzle comes together. It’s not entirely unexpected — after all, the picture is on the box — but it’s also not a precise image… But you’re satisfied with the outcome.

For all its faults, Pieces is undeniably a fun horror film worthy of recommendation.