|
Search through our store:
vCheats.com - Pieces
|
List Price: $24.98
Our Price: $13.51
Your Save: $ 11.47 ( 46% )
Average Customer Rating:  
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Grindhouse Releasing
Starring: Christopher George, Lynda Day George, Paul L. Smith, Gerard Tichy, Edmund Purdom
Directed By: Juan Piquer Simon
|
|
|
Aspect Ratio: 1.66:1
Audience Rating: Unrated
Binding: DVD
Brand: WEA-DES MOINES VIDEO
EAN: 0797679000324
Format: DVD
Label: Grindhouse Releasing
Manufacturer: Grindhouse Releasing
Number Of Items: 2
Publisher: Grindhouse Releasing
Region Code: 0
Release Date: 2008-10-28
Running Time: 85
Studio: Grindhouse Releasing
Theatrical Release Date: 1983
|
|
|
|
|
|
Spotlight customer reviews:
|
Customer Rating:
Summary: It's like a pizza where half the pepperoni fell off in the box, and here's why...
Comment: Welcome again my lovers of horror, and for those that have been keeping up with my horror movie reviews. This time around, after having already reviewed "The Prowler" and "The Burning" I figure I might as well go back to the '80s for another forgotten fan-favorite of the slasher film subgenre known as "Pieces".
I came across this movie by coincidence online, and figured I might as well watch it since I had a good 90 minutes of free time. Now, having seen many slasher films, including all EIGHT (count 'em, EIGHT) of the original Friday the 13th films, and the previously mentioned "The Prowler" and "The Burning", I know my slasher-horror. So I know the feeling of half-satisfaction in my movie lover's gut isn't just indigestion...what we have here is a half-done slasher film.
Don't get me wrong, "Pieces" isn't a throwaway movie. There's a sufficient amount of stuff to enjoy here. We got:
-A considerable amount of blood and gore, necessary with basically any slasher film, so it does it's job there.
-Several cases of nudity, also an almost obligatory factor of slashers.
-An opening that grabs your attention, which is a great move on the director's and writer's side.
-A rather hilarious scene featuring one of the most stereotypical Asian guys I've ever seen... the accent, the martial arts skills, the attitude, it's priceless!
-An ending that makes you go OH SNAP!
So we do have plenty of good aspects about this movie, so what gives it the 3-star rating? Well I thought a lot of this movie moved at a rather slow pace. The characters all felt pretty stereotypical, and even though I love myself a good police story, the one presented here wasn't all that exciting. Save the investigative cops for the "Saw" series!
Well, that about wraps up this review. Overall, "Pieces" is not a bad movie by any means, but coming from a generation that brought us the Friday the 13th and Halloween films, it's been outshined pretty easily. Watch it if you're a slasher film lover and want to watch all the horror movies remembered in the hearts of us gorehounds! Thanks for the time, and peace. (or should I say...Pieces!)
Customer Rating:
Summary: Gloriously gory but incurably dumb
Comment: Let's face it: If you intend to buy or rent "Pieces," you're not looking for the cinematic version of a Dostoevsky novel. However, you might be looking for something that contains just the tiniest bit of gray matter. Lotsa luck. "Pieces" is a spectacular piece of gross-out cinema (sensitive viewers should keep barf bags handy), but it is also dumber than one might consider to be humanly possible: clumsy plotting, terrible dialogue, universally bad acting. Ed Wood was equivalent to Akira Kurosawa compared to the geniuses who made this masterpiece. You can feel your IQ sinking as you watch. By the second hour, you'll be lucky if you can still pass a first-grade equivalency exam.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Slightly Overrated
Comment: It's not one of the top ten horror films ever. It's not even one of the top ten horror films of the nineteen eighties. It's amusing enough in its own deranged axe chopping way. Better than watching (say) Halloween Part 4. (Or is that damning with faint praise?)
Customer Rating:
Summary: worst slasher film
Comment: I knew that I was not about to see a quality film when this title was included in a 'Z-grade video night' at a girlfriend's place. Despite the warnings, I was still surprised at just how bad this film was. It was fortunate that there were a lot of us there to share the pain with each other.
The film attempts to tell the story of a dark, psychopathic killer, one in which a slasher type of character heads off to splatter damsels in distress.
In reality, the plot is a thinly disguised excuse for the producers to promote their own jaded philosophies on life (watch the end credits and the 'these people are not real' disclaimer at the end for a real laugh).
The movie is frequently lacking direction, and fails to develop its characters to any degree whatsoever. What's even worse though is the editing of this film. The film repeats scenes (often 10 to 20 seconds long) up to 4 or 5 times in a row.
I think that this was an attempt to emulate films like 'My Bloody Valentine' slasher sequences, but it fails utterly. The film would probably be about 1/3 of its length if we weren't forced to watch the main character move his head in front of the setting sun half a dozen times (yes, that's all that happens in that repeated scene).
I give this movie my 'worst slasher film I've ever seen' award. I doubt that it will be topped any time soon.
Customer Rating:
Summary: An absurd slasher classic
Comment: Now, I consider myself a serious film fan, in that I see movies as more than just entertainment, more than just time spent in front of a screen simply zoning out for two hours. Yet I still have this fascination with movies that are "so-bad-it's-good", and I'm not above saying that I get a kick out of films that are so inept that I end up enjoying it because of it's sheer stupidity. Directed by Spanish filmmaker Juan Piquer Simon, Pieces is probably the most infamous low-budget slasher flick to ever come out of the subgenre's gory glory days of the early-1980's. It is also the ultimate "so-bad-it's-good" horror film!
The movie's pre-credit sequence takes place in 1942 Boston, where a young boy hacks his mother to death after she catches him, and then demeans him, for playing with a jigsaw puzzle of a naked woman. After the credits, the story jumps ahead forty years, and we are at a university where a chainsaw-wielding maniac is dispatching female co-eds and taking severed parts with him. It seems the killer is making a human jigsaw puzzle using parts of his numerous nubile victims. The cops, lead by Christopher George, are (naturally) clueless, so they decide to recruit a former tennis pro (played by George's wife, Linda Day) and a campus "Casanova" (played by Ian Sera) to go undercover to catch the sicko.
If the premise alone sounds implausible and dumb, you have heard nothing yet! Pieces is a shamelessly repulsive, badly-written, badly-acted, clumsily-edited, politically-incorrect, degrading, dingy-looking movie. This movie is so bad, and so insulting, by all accounts it should be dumped in the garbage and set on fire. However, by some -I'd say hell spawn- miracle, Pieces manages to be highly enjoyable laugh-filled riot, in addition to actually living up to its massively gruesome hype.
Pieces promises that "You don't have to go to Texas for a chainsaw massacre!" and that "It's exactly what you think it is!". Well, I can say that, despite the cheap effects, this is one of the most unapologetically brutal pictures in horror history. Simon takes pleasure in giving the audience exactly what they've paid to see, giving us graphic, and sometimes slow-motion, displays of: hackings, knifings, severed limbs and torsos, entrails, and a never-ending flow of fake blood! Those rather silly taglines and the film's notoriety are definitely not without merit!
It goes without saying that you don't walk into a movie called Pieces expecting to find a deep, psychological thriller. I didn't, and I knew what I was in for. This movie was made long before the days of The Silence of the Lambs and Se7en. By the time those films were made, psychology was seen in the culture as a viable tool to catch a serial killer. Pieces was produced in a day and age when horror movies like these (as well as their hard-boiled cop characters) just snickered at such ideas. The serial killer was simply a shock tactic; a cheap way for filmmakers to put more blood and guts on the screen. But that's only the surface of its politically-incorrectness. All of the killer's victims are women, and are hacked in various stages of undress. This is one film that would justify the critics' view of the slasher genre as misogynistic. Also, the dean of the university refers to another character's homosexuality as an "affliction". And in one of the picture's many illogical moments, we get a few bad Asian stereotypes thrown in.
But if Pieces is nothing but wanton extreme violence, produced in a time of ignorance, what could possibly make it worthwhile? The only thing more shocking than the gore in Pieces is that the film is so awfully constructed it's actually hysterical! When I say "many illogical moments", I mean it! There are a lot of scenes in the movie that leave you crying, "What the hell?!" and "Oh, come on!" while chuckling at the same time. What's really awful about the script is its complete and utter inability to build any real suspense and its laziness to develop Paul Smith or Jack Taylor as believable suspects. These two guys end up looking useless. The dialogue of the characters and the actors' delivery are so silly, if you close your eyes you'll think you're listening to an episode of Scooby Doo, Where Are You?! But believe it or not, it's the bad script, bad dialogue, and bad acting/dubbing that serve as blessings in disguise. What these shortcomings do is provide Pieces with a lot of unintentional, yet much-needed, humor to offset the extremely graphic and unsettling violence, and in turn, they separate the film from similar, yet oppressively dour and completely irresponsible slasher flicks such as I Spit On Your Grave and Don't Answer the Phone.
There's no doubt that serious film fans and critics will continue to bemoan the existence of Pieces for years to come, but the film wasn't made for them. Pieces is a movie made specifically for the gorehounds; one that actually delivers on the promise of its famous taglines. However, the sacrifices made in order to give the audience what they want results in an unintentionally comedic, and therefore enjoyable, experience for those horror fans that have yet to discover this absurd slasher classic.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
