Horrorfest 2017: Pieces

Now we move on to a favorite of director Eli Roth, the Italian/Spanish/Puerto Rican slasher PIECES from 1983. I went into it figuring it was probably a mistake. After all, I've never seen an Eli Roth movie I liked, and he specializes in the kind of horror/exploitation that can really easily be done horribly wrong. Still, not many directors have lists of their favorites online, and Roth is a big name in horror, so here we go.

PIECES is about what you'd expect from a movie loved by Eli Roth. It starts out with a bang, as a kid is interrupted putting together a puzzle of a naked woman by his furious mother. The kid snaps, murders his mother, then fools authorities into thinking someone else did it while the kid hid in the closet.

After that, we flash forward to a college campus, years later. Women are turning up dead on campus with missing body parts – a head here, a torso there. After each murder, we in the audience are treated to a scene of the assailant completeing the naked-women puzzle from the opening sequence. So it's clear – whoever the killer is is this kid, now grown up, taking "pieces" of women to "build his puzzle."

A couple cops (Christopher George and Frank Brana) suspect the big man on campus (Paul L. Smith), but he's innocent so he teams up with an undercover cop (Linday Day) to figure out who the real killer is. I'm guessing Roth loves this movie not just for the over-the-top gore and gratuitous nudity but also for the "Creativity" of the murder scenes. In an era when FRIDAY THE 13th and HALLOWEEN were shocking people, PIECES was taking it to a whole other level.

I'm guessing this kind of flick was probably cooler to have as a favorite before people could easily access it. If you had a beat up print you saw at a 2nd run movie theater one time, or you had an old VHS you got at the video store that no one else ever rented, it could blow your mind and then you could spread the legend of how great it is and then its reputation could precede it. Now that basically everything is easily accessible via digital means, it's easy to call the bluff.