The school's dean asks Professor Brown, who teaches anatomy, to give the detectives a tour of the school. While studying outside in broad daylight, a girl is decapitated with a chainsaw by an unidentified killer who steals her head. He also unboxes the bloodied jigsaw puzzle and starts to put it together. Forty years later, after witnessing a skateboarder smash into a mirror, a black-clad figure opens a box containing the bloodied clothing and a photograph of Timmy's mother. The police believe Timmy's story and he is sent to live with his aunt. When the police arrive, Timmy hides inside a closet and pretends to be a witness to the crime. After she orders him to dispose of the puzzle, he returns with an axe, murders her, then dismembers her body with a hacksaw. In fact, director Juan Piquer Simón is on record as being quite proud of the visual effects, especially how they used a pig’s carcass to depict the effect of the chainsaw cutting through a young woman’s stomach.In 1942, a 10-year-old boy named Timmy is chastised by his mother for playing with a jigsaw puzzle of a nude woman. The filmmakers actually outdid themselves with the murders, as some of the effects are genuinely quite chilling. And pretty much everyone is over dramatic.Īnd like most horror films around this period, the soundtrack is actually quite effective and has that lovely retro creepy synth sound to grace the creepiness of the killer’s presence. Naturally, the acting is pretty much what you would expect from a 1980s horror film, which had the tagline “you don’t have to go to Texas for a chainsaw massacre”. The fact that everyone is apparently a prime suspect and it’s the school dean that recommends this cover up doesn’t even register as weird to detective Bracken. They’ll also do their best to cover up the grim goings on by not telling the press, because a chainsaw wielding pervert on a university campus is not in the public interest and would result in “mass panic”. Of the many things I learnt about police procedures, Pieces taught me that police will not waste a coroner’s time if there’s an anatomy school teacher at hand. The incompetence of the police in Pieces is remarkable and easily the most amusing aspect of the film. But leading police detective Bracken (Christopher George) takes a shine to him after Kendall advises him that “something was not quite right” about a girl’s murder.Īlso assigned to the task is a tennis champion, Mary Riggs (Linda Day George), because being an undercover police officer is the perfect day job for such an athlete.
What qualifies Kendall to be handed such a important and dangerous task is not really clear.
If there is a moral to this story, it’s never get between a boy and his pornographic puzzle.Įssentially, that’s what happens at the beginning of the film and after witnessing the said boy take an axe to his over-reacting mother, the film skips forward 40 years to see what the little devil is up to now.ĭescribed by Cabin Fever director Eli Roth as “a masterpiece of early 1980s sleaze”, Pieces is a typical early 80s slasher, that takes place in a university campus.Īttractive, physically fit and scantily clad girls are being offed by a lunatic with a chainsaw and the authorities are so baffled by the case, they’ve taken student Kendall (Ian Sera) on board as a trainee officer in an effort to crack the case.