As he grew up, the maniac upgraded his slaughter tool of choice, trading in the axe for a deafening, gas-powered chainsaw. Now he prowls a non-descript “New England University” (think: the Hong Kong gag from A Fistful of Yen, again played completely straight), searching for the right parts to put together a fleshy alternative to his original brainteaser. We know who the killer is from the grotesque pre-credits teaser – a sexually confused man-child, who butchered his mother with an axe after she scolded him for playing with a naked lady puzzle (complete with a piece that’s entirely 70s bush). Pieces often resembles a parallel dimension Scooby Doo episode – only in this mind-bending transmission from Hell’s Cartoon Network, there’s no dog, Velma smokes weed whilst gabbing about fucking on a waterbed, and Shaggy is a closeted college professor, always giving someone the side-eye. Pieces – it’s exactly what you think it is – a mean-spirited, poorly dubbed Spanish knock-off of Italian giallo. However, this lack of self-awareness is what marks Pieces as an authentically bizarre artifact: oblivious sincerity that results in sheer filmic lunacy.
That’s right – a movie in which a coed skateboards through a mirror being hauled by two moving men (silent comedy style) during the scene that establishes its campus setting was originally envisioned as “high brow” by the man who made it. It’s Airplane! with chainsaws yet the picture was never meant to be a parody.Ī vaguely smug, straight-faced sensibility is injected via Juan Piquer Simón, as the Mystery on Monster Island director allegedly intended to make an art film out D’Amato and Randall’s script. An utter masterwork of illogic, smut producer Dick Randall ( Slaughter High, Don’t Open Till Christmas) and notorious schlockmeister Joe D’Amato ( Beyond the Darkness) are incorporating a kitchen sink, almost ZAZ-like sensibility when it comes to the preposterous manner in which their somewhat simple and clichéd story unfolds. In the annals of trash cinema’s Hall of Fame, few films come close to matching the sheer nonsense-per-scene factor that Pieces packs into less than ninety minutes. Trailers: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre Motel Hell The seventeenth entry into this disreputable canon is the skeevy, utterly bonkers slasher farce, Pieces… Ziemba and Laird Jimenez (often pulling from the extensive AGFA archives) are truly doing Satan’s bidding by bringing ATX weekly doses of delightful trash art.
This column is a concentrated effort to keep that spirit of strangeness alive, as programmers Joe A. Though the company has obviously grown into an internationally recognized chain of first run movie palaces, the Drafthouse Ritz in Austin, Texas remains committed to showcasing genre repertory programming, namely via its Terror Tuesday and Weird Wednesday showcases. Beyond being situated in a town that has long aspired to remain eccentric in the face of all normality, it’s easy to forget that the original Alamo started as something of a private screening club, running prints of the odd and obscure into all hours of the night. The Alamo Drafthouse is a brand built on weird.
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