Directed By: Juan Piquer Simon

I guess this month has turned into the month of slasher movies this year and there’s certainly nothing with that. I hadn’t intended it to be this way, but I’m like a leaf on the wind so planning isn’t really my forte.

This time we have the mental, Boston-Madrid co-production, fairly mysognistic Pieces.

Though it’s not quite as sordid as that poster might suggest, we’re not entirely that far off either. We start with little Timmy and the heartwarming sight of him completing a jigsaw puzzle. His mother watches on proud until she sees that oh no, it’s actually a naked lady jigsaw puzzle. Well, this won’t do. She lambasts him for being just like his father and is pretty hysterical about it all until little Timmy appears again and axes her in various ways. Well I guess there’s only one way to axe someone. I suppose what I mean is that she ends up in…pieces.

We fast forward 40 years later, which really narrows down our lists of suspects to be honest and around a Boston campus, various women have been getting chainsawed up. Will our suspectly non-Bostonian-looking detectives solve the case? Well yes, but not before a whole bunch of other women get killed.

That’s really all there is to it. It’s incredibly brazen in being what it is. Apart from, say, two victims, all of these women happen to get in various states of undress first. Such as the woman who decides to go swimming and strips down to her already very skimpy bikini, only to go that one step further anyway. It’s also quite gory, normally in the aftermath but sometimes with shots of the chainsaw cutting into bodies (Really they just used animal carcases…I said that as though it was Ok then) but it all happens very quickly.

It also has my favourite of slasher movie tropes; when someone sees the killer and says “oh it’s you,” before something bad happens to them. That one never fails to put a smile on this weird face of mine.

It also has an utterly insane ending. You could argue that the movie is just so-so and you probably wouldn’t be wrong, but those last ten seconds are something else. So much that it’s worth suffering the rest of the movie for? Well I don’t know. However, deciding to go for the Carrie ending because hey, it’s a horror flick and they all need to end on a scare and then somehow landing on that is…well it’s a thought process I would’ve loved to have been a part of.