A Major Disappointment

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

This film opens up with a mother discovering her young son with a jigsaw puzzle of a naked woman. He responds to her rage by graphically axing her to death. This pretty much sets the tone for what is to come. Graphic gore, gratuitous nudity, red herrings, horrendously bad dialogue and gaffs galore this is a bad movie. But it's also an immensely enjoyable one. I like it so much that I own it on pre cert VHS, have 3 copies on DVD and will probably also purchase on BR. I just don't tire of watching it. And it's not all bad. The gore is decent. The girls are attractive. It's also part Italian and there are effective giallo elements here. Essential viewing to slasher fans.

This movie is the best kind of hot mess cult classic. It has such an amazing juxtaposition of completely absurd, out-of-place dialogue, mediocre acting, and subpar dubbing along with some truly chilling moments and AWESOME murders that you can't help but love it.The movie opens with a young boy being caught and subsequently berated by his mother for playing with a pornographic puzzle (I had no idea such a thing existed so thank you for that). But don't worry, he kills her with an axe and then feigns innocence when the police arrive so he is sent off to live with his aunt. Fast forward 40 years and his lust for killing is still there, only now he stalks college co-eds and keeps pieces of their bodies to assemble his own perfect woman (I'm really not sure what his end goal is there).It's a pretty straight forward slasher/mystery, but the red herrings that are thrown at you are just laughably obvious. Like I'm really going to believe that the sketchy gardener who has keys to everything on campus (Paul L. Smith) is the actual killer? Or the anatomy professor (Jack Taylor, though I wish it could have been Thomas Lennon aka Lieutenant Dangle from Reno 911) who is clearly socially stunted and has working knowledge of how to disassemble a body? But it doesn't matter because this movie is FUN.You have these moments of legitimately high tension — like the killer following the girl as she unsuspectingly dances down the hallway and then trapping her in the elevator — and then, shortly after, probably the best known moment of ridiculousness when a completely random dude jumps out of the bushes and scares Kendall (Ian Sera) as he is investigating with some pretty sweet kung fu moves.There's god awful acting and some of the cheesiest, stiffest lines ever… but you have brilliant killings like the female reporter being slashed on the water bed and then flailing in the bloody water in slow motion before he stabs her through the back of the head (but, naturally, you can see the fake knife bend in the most obvious way in the pulled back shot). Or the girl with her legs chainsawed off in the corner of locker room (definitely one of the most brutal scenes I've witnessed).I thought the music (done by Stelvio Cipriani and Carlo Maria Cordio) was a standout, too, though some moments were eerily reminiscent of The Blood Stained Shadow, which Cipriani also scored.But the TRUE gem of this movie is the ending. Not only do we have the very obvious twist when we find out the killer, but the last two bits of surprise are just THE BEST. I was already loving it but with the closing scene I was LITERALLY clapping at the TV as the credits rolled. Worth it for that alone, trust me.

This 1982 horror film stars Christopher George, Lynda Day, Ian Sera, Edmund Purdom and Paul L. Smith. This begins with a young boy working on a jigsaw puzzle and soon he kills his demanding mother. Forty years later, a mysterious killer starts butchering selected victims at a college campus with chainsaws and knives. He uses their parts to make a jigsaw puzzle in the form of a body. The late, George (Graduation Day) plays police lieutenant, Bracken who tries to find the killer, George's wife, Day plays tennis player, Mary Riggs, Sera plays student, Kendall who helps the police, Purdom plays the Dean and Smith (Popeye) plays grounds keeper, Willard. This is a decent slasher flick with some gruesome deaths and a good, atmospheric score I recommend for fans of the genre.

Here's a bloody, and I mean bloody chainsaw flick, this makes the Texas Chainsaw look like pumped versions of The Sound of Music. Take the warning on the front cover seriously before watching the dispatches of torso's whatever that follow. A little boy caught by his mother with a nude jigsaw becomes killer, ending her in just the start of the carnage that follows. Cut many many years later, to the eighties on a school campus, we have a nut, with a chainsaw, cutting his way through nubile bodies to create his own human jigsaw. Siuck f..k. Christopher George, a detective on the case, sends a woman, undercover, who's trained in Karate to catch this madman, where it's not easy. We have one suspect, Midnight Express's Paul Smith as a caretaker, bearing a chainsaw. Could he be the one. A student on campus helps George, in his investigation, going through mugsheets, whatever. This bright intellectual really has his work cut out for him, where he thinks this work is kind of cool. Meanwhile, the chainsaw nut out there is still making the cut. One girl literally wets herself in terror while getting it in the elevator. As an Italian cheapie classic, Pieces is one horror fan's guilty pleasure, with a not so happy ending for an innocent party. If you want blood and hot bodies, don't pass this one up. I'd option for this over the Texas Chainsaw Massacres anyday. The Asian jogger who went to attack our undercover hottie, who outwits him, then takes off again as though everything's cool. What the hell was that about.