Juan Piquer Simon's Pieces certainly gets off to a demented, bone-chilling start, as a young teenager, who is repressed by his mother, hacks her up with an axe after being harshly scolded for playing with a puzzle that features female in the nude. Fast-forwarding forty years later to a college campus in Boston, a chainsaw-wielding serial killer is on the loose, killing beautiful young co-eds, severing their bodies, and taking various pieces of their bodies with him. In an effort to stop this demented killer, Lt. Bracken makes a deal with the dean of the campus, sending agent Mary Riggs undercover as the school tennis teacher in an attempt to identify the man responsible for their heinous crimes. Juan Piquer Simon's Pieces ia a violent, cheesy horror film that draws heavily from the Italian Giallo films of the 1960s and 1970s when it comes to creating an effectively, stylistic atmosphere. From heavy use of first person pov cinematography, to effective sound design that uses the killer's breathing to chilling effect, Pieces' best sequences are its murder sequences which bring a ton of violence and atmosphere to the table. Well-made from a style perspective, the story itself of pieces is a pretty cookie-cutter horror film narrative which relies heavily on a lot of the classic tropes of the genre to push its story forward. This generic narrative isn't very detrimental to the overall experience though, as what stands out the most about Pieces is its commentary on sexual repression. Pieces is essentially a horror film which warns about the dangers of a repression, with our main antagonist being a psychopathic killer who is attempting to create the world's first real-life, human-flesh jigsaw puzzle. While it's never outright stated, the opening sequence establishes a child whose repression forces him to violence, with Simon's Pieces being a film that warns about these dangers in an over-the-top, gorey way. Featuring a healthy dosage of gore and violence, an impressive atmosphere, and a cheesy narrative full of tropes, Juan Piquer Simon's Pieces is a fun early 80s horror film which even manages to comment on the dangers of repressing sexual urges of developing youngsters.
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AuthorLove of all things cinema brought me here. Archives
June 2023
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