From the early 80's, this half Italian, half American mess of a film tries it's best to be what it thinks a horror movie is, but misses on just about every level in the grandest way possible.
The film actually starts out fairly interestingly as we go back to 1944 and see a perverted little kid getting discovered by his mom doing a nudie jigsaw puzzle. Mom is none too pleased and proceeds to go nutso on her son, who returns the favor in spades with a big ass knife.
Fast forward 40 years and a dude is cutting women up on a College campus in Boston, the name of the University is never given, but it doesn't matter. This campus by the way, seems to have about 10 students and they all major in Tennis or Aerobics.
The movie is a gorgeous mess right from the start as half the actors are Italian and the other half American. This leads to some of the voices being dubbed, and by some magic of film making, even the ones that aren't still appear to be dubbed. I'm fairly certain the directors knowledge of American culture is fairly limited. He seems to know about karate, jazzercise, water beds and not much else.
The boyfriend, or fuck buddy, or whatever he is, of one of the victims is immediately recruited by the lead detective to assist in the case. At first the detective is just like "keep an eye on things", and that's swell I suppose, since there are only like 2 cops in the entire movie. But then he decides to send a female cop into the school on an undercover mission and assigns the student the task of making sure nothing happens to her. You might think it'd be insulting for a police officer to have a 120 pound student assigned to watch over her, but in all fairness, her real job is as a world champion tennis pro and she's just being a cop to earn some extra money. Yes. Eventually with all leads exhausted and women continuing to die, the detective sends the kid downtown to help the other detective go through paper work. Of course it takes the kid 5 minutes to figure things out by doing the first thing you'd assume the real cops would have done about 70 minutes ago when the movie started.
The script is confounding to say the least. The cops are all over the map, sometimes it's a giant case they they've got they're best people working on, but most of the time they're lamenting how they don't have any manpower, which leads to them farming out most of their work to student. This kid is an all purpose back, part detective who solves crimes, part comedic relief who cracks racist jokes, and part Lothario who women beg for sex. Yes, women in this movie beg him to have sex with them. He's quite literally the center of every aspect of the movie but he's just not very good. He's got close to no charisma and he's not a very good actor, but he is American, I'll give him that. I get the feeling that if the Director watched Charles In Charge he'd come away thinking Willie Aimes was the hunk.
There's some near incomprehensible, both in the fact that I don't know why it's in the movie, and that I do not understand what is supposed to be happening, stuff with a janitor. This dude is a big burly guy that looks sort of like a fat Merlin Olson or if you're a wrestling fan, Norman The Lunatic. He has one facial expression, and the only way to really explain it is that he looks at everyone he's in a scene with as if they've just ripped a nasty fart and he's perturbed by it. He goes from being the janitor to a suspect for no real reason at all, gets into a massive fight with all the detectives, cops, and yes, even the student, gets arrested and then let go and back to being a janitor. This entire story arc takes about 5 minutes and has no build up or follow through.
There's a fun scene involving what at first appears to be an attempted rape, then an attempted murder, but is laughed away as a simple misunderstanding between the female cop and the schools Karate Professor that couldn't be anymore racist if he were wearing a bowl hat and fake buck teeth.
The gore is good, I guess that's something. The trouble is that movie is so frighteningly stupid that you'd probably be more apt to laugh at the kills than get grossed out. At least they give you time to rest your sides, which if you're anything like me, will be sore from laughter.
The nudity is decent, and the extended aerobic scenes featuring a girl with an ass plumper than a Ballpark Frank is a highlight. Although It's hard to respect a girl who has trouble finding the bathroom, even if it is in the basement for some reason. She's also involved in one of the greatest chase scenes I've ever seen as the she at once is attempting to flee what she thinks might be a murdering intruder while slowly getting dressed, collecting her things and then turning the lights off before leaving the room. Then she somehow misses the fact that a man is standing in an elevator with her, holding a chainsaw behind his back. I'm assuming she's in school on an aerobics scholarship and not because of a high GPA.
There are some other standout sequences. The horrible editing of a girl getting chopped up, the riveting scene in which two women play tennis for what feels like 5 minutes without either one of them ever moving their feet, the nonsensical crashing of a roller skater into a giant mirror. And last but not least, the final scene, which while not making any sense at all, seems to make perfect sense considering the baffling 90 minutes of film that precedes it.
A lost masterpiece in the pantheon of bad movies, Pieces is fun as hell, if for no other reason than the fact that it just doesn't seem to have any idea how bad it is or how little sense it makes.
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