Original title: Mil gritos tiene la noche

!!SPOILER WARNING: THIS REVIEW GIVES AWAY THE ENDING!!

This hilarious slasher from Spain’s Juan Piquer Simón boasted British and American co-producers (Dick Randall and Steve Minasian) which muddies the waters of the film’s parentage rather but claims that it was partly funded from Puerto Rico and that screenwriter John Shadow was another pseudonym for Joe D’Amato are both wrong. Not that you’ll worry too much as you’ll have other things on your mind, chief among which is the question “was it actually meant to be this funny?”

In 1942, 10-year-old Timmy (Alejandro Hernández) is chastised by his mother (May Heatherly) for playing with a jigsaw puzzle of a nude woman and he reacts by murdering her with an axe, dismembering her body with a hacksaw and hiding in a closet so that when the police turn up, they believe that he was a witness to the crime and not the perpetrator. Forty years later, a series of murders plagues a university in Boston where students are being attacked by a black-clad killer wielding a chainsaw. Lieutenant Bracken (Christopher George) and Sergeant Holden (Franck Braña) are on the case but they’re not the brightest of flatfoots – “the killer is someone who is either on or near the campus” announces Bracken in a display of deductive reasoning that would put Sherlock Holmes to shame. They persuade the dean (Edmund Purdom) to allow them to send a policewoman, Mary Riggs (Linda Day George) undercover into the school to root out the killer. Hulking groundskeeper, Willard (Paul L. Smith) is too obvious a suspect to be taken seriously, but student Kendall (Ian Sera) proves useful in their investigations. More young women are killed before the police finally realise that the dean is the killer, Timmy now all grown up and trying to piece together a composite woman from pilfered body parts like the jigsaw puzzle that he’s still obsessed with.

The plot is largely a by-the-numbers slasher then but what has given Pieces its lasting cult appeal are some of the most ridiculous moments ever to disgrace a slasher film. It sets out its stall early with a scene straight from a silent comedy in which a skateboarder runs into a large sheet of glass being conveniently carried out of an alleyway by a pair of delivery men. Solid gold comedy moments like this abound throughout the film. The killer entering an elevator with one of his victims while trying to conceal a chainsaw behind his back is perhaps the most notorious, but there are plenty of others – an insane, out-of-nowhere moment wherein Mary is attacked by a kung fu professor (played by Brucesploitation veteran Bruce Le) who promptly apologies and goes on his way; the head-scratchingly stupid ending; or the marvellous moment when an overwrought Mary, having failed to prevent a killing exclaims “while we out here fumbling with that music… the lousy bastard was in there killing her!” before letting fly with an ear-piercing shriek of “bastard! BASTARD!! BASTAAAARD!!!”

Did Shadow and Simón really mean for us to be laughing at all this or were they being deadly serious and just ended up making a dreadful film? Simón‘s track record proves that wasn’t the greatest of film-makers – this was, after all, the man who had already given us Supersonic Man (1979) and Misterio en la isla de los monstruos/Mystery on Monster Island (1981) and was on his way to Los nuevos extraterrestres/Visitor (1983), Slugs, muerte viscosa/Slugs (1988), The Rift (1990) and La mansión de los Cthulhu/Cthulhu Mansion (1992) so he clearly wasn’t the most proficient of directors. But Pieces is often so outrageously silly that you can’t help but suspects that he might have been having us on all the time. It would explain the extraordinary sloppiness of the proceedings – the prologue is set in 1942 but the costumes are very contemporary and the jigsaw puzzle (laughably described as being “for kids of all ages”) features a photography from model and actress Barbi Benton that was clearly taken in the 1970s.

Elsewhere, just for once we don’t get the trip to the nightclub/disco that we’d expect from a late 70s/early 90s slasher, but we do get the next best thing – the heavy-breathing perving over a disco-themed exercise class. The music they dance to is of course completely anonymous and the sort of thing that no-one would have bought in the real world had it ever been released as a single, and the film’s actual music cues, credited to Librado Pastor on Spanish language prints and the Italian library music publisher CAM on English language ones, is a collection of cues that sound almost like – but are just different enough – any number of pieces by Goblin or Fabio Frizzi.

“So bad it’s good” was a phrase over-used in cult movie circles, particularly in the 1980s when it first started becoming fashionable to sneer at low-budget fare without any context. Pieces though does fit that description – it is, by most standards, a pretty awful film, but the humour – intentional or otherwise – makes it a lot of fun and although it’s shoddily made, it’s never boring. It’s a magpie of a film, stealing shiny bits and pieces from all over the exploitation shop, mixing the kung fu films that had stood co-producer Randall in such good stead in the 1970s with the new, Halloween (1978)-inspired slashers and making sure that the female victims are somehow contrived to be topless during almost every murder. It certainly knew what its market was, and it would be hard to argue that it didn’t deliver. It may not deliver the goods terribly well, but that’s probably beside the point.

It’s often claimed that Pieces fell afoul of the “video nasties” moral panic that gripped the UK in the early 1980s though there’s no evidence that this was in fact the case. It may have been confiscated on a local level by over-zealous police forces, but it doesn’t appear on any of the official lists issued by the Director of Public Prosecutions.

Crew
Director: J.P. Simon [real name: Juan Piquer Simon]; An Almena Films S.A., Fort Films production; Produced by: Dick Randall, Steve Minasian; Screenplay by: Dick Randall, John Shadow; Director of Photography: Juan Mariné [John Marine on English language prints]; Editor: Antonio Gimeno; Music by: Librado Pastor [CAM on English language prints]; Wardrobe: Mercedes Marfil; Make-up: Pedro Camacho; Hairdresser: Alicia Regueiro; Special Effects: Basilio Cortijo; Art Directors: Gumer Andres, Gonzalo Gonzalo

Cast
Christopher George (Lt Bracken); Linda Day [real name: Linda Day George] (Mary Riggs); Franck Braña (Sgt. Hoden); Edmund Purdom (dean); Ian Sera (Kendall); Paul L. Smith (Willard); Jack Taylor (Prof. Brown); Gérard Tichy (Dr Jennings); May Heatherly [Mrs Reston]; Hilda Fuchs (secretary); Roxana Nieto [Virginia Palmer]; Cristina Cottrel [Jenny]; Leticia Marfil [Suzie]; Silvia Gambino [Mary]; Carmen Aguado [Carla]; Francisco Alvez [real name: Paco Alvez] [Alister Schwartz]; Alejandro Enciso [cop #1]; Carlos H. Aztarain [real name: Hugo Astar] [cop #2]; Emilio Linder [coroner]; Victor Iregua [cop at dorm]; Mario Barros [student]; Nicholas A. Burd [student]; Alejandro Hernández [Timmy Reston]; Isabelle Luque [Sylvia Costa]

For more details on this title, visit the main EOFFTV site.