A young boy works on a nude-woman jigsaw puzzle while singing “Humpty Dumpty,” and when his mother viciously chastises him for such obscenity, he hacks her into bits and pieces and then poses as a traumatized victim to the police. This 1942 prologue sets the stage for the prime narrative of Pieces, in which a Boston college campus is wracked by dismemberment murders that baffle the police. The suspects are many: an anatomy professor (Jack Taylor), a decorous dean (Edmund Purdom), a student lothario (Ian Sera) and a groundskeeper (Paul L. Smith, aka Popeye’s Blutto) who does little more than make menacingly evil faces. Shot in and around Spain by Juan Piquer Simón, the film’s dubbed English dialogue is predictably laughable, though less so than its story’s myriad inane touches, including: former tennis pro-turned-undercover cop Mary Riggs (Lynda Day George) repeatedly screaming “Bastard!” with increasing ferocity; a braless sexpot casually opining that “The most beautiful thing in the world is smoking pot and fucking on a waterbed;” and a kung-fu teacher arbitrarily appearing out of nowhere to scare the bejesus out of Riggs and then blaming his faux-attack on “bad chop suey.” Simón’s many red herrings are ineffective and his giallo-inspired shots of the killer’s gloved hands and shadowy figure are a far cry from the work of Dario Argento. Nonetheless, as an example of sexist, racist sleaze, Pieces is an inadvertently amusing relic of early ‘80s grindhouse, replete with a Frankenstein-ian coda punctuated by a hilariously nonsensical final money shot.
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