2009 remake aside, director Wes Craven’s 1972 revenge thriller The Last House on the Left is a standalone exploitation classic – but that’s not for a lack of trying to get a sequel into production over the years. Investor Stephen Minasian (also an important behind the scenes on the Friday the 13th franchise) really wanted to bring a The Last House on the Left Part II into the world, and one of the filmmakers he approached about the project was a Spanish director named Juan Piquer Simón, whose previous credits included the adventure films When Time Began, Supersonic Man, Mystery on Monster Island, and The Sea Devils.
Simón turned down the Last House sequel offer because he found the concept to be boring. So Minasian and fellow producer Dick Randall, who had worked with the director on Supersonic Man and would go on to work with Minasian on several projects, presented him with a 30-page treatment for a horror TV movie idea called Jigsaw. Now this was an idea Simón could work with – and he proceeded to turn it into one of the most mind-boggling, blood-soaked, nudity-filled exploitation slasher movies of the era. The film that would become known as Pieces (or The Night Has 1,000 Screams in Spain) drifted far away from its TV movie roots.
Randall, who was once a joke writer for legendary comedian Milton Berle, crafted the script for the film with Italian producer Roberto Loyola, a.k.a. John W. Shadow – and while production took place primarily in Spain with a Spanish director at the helm, the influence of the Italian giallos of the time is very clear. The story is a whodunnit mystery, the killer wears black gloves, the dialogue is dubbed, there’s an odd sensibility, and plenty of vibrant red blood flows across the screen.
There are also some moments that are absolutely nonsensical. Randall’s production company was based in Hong Kong and he had just made several films with martial artist Bruce Le, whose starring vehicles were cheaply produced and made to capitalize on the success of the late martial arts star Bruce Lee (thus the Bruce Le stage name). Randall requested that Le be given a cameo in the movie – and since there wasn’t much to the script, Simón gladly added in a scene where Le attacks a woman in the night, terrifying her with his martial arts moves – and then apologizes, blaming his behavior on the “bad chop suey” he just ate. This scene comes out to nowhere to baffle the audience and make us laugh, then the characters move on from it and Le disappears back into the night.
Simón wasn’t aiming to just make this another whodunnit slasher. He also had the goal of turning it into a “masterpiece of surrealism and dark humor.” Whether he succeeded is up to individual viewers to decide – but it certainly is weird and often amusing.
SETTING
As mentioned, filming primarily took place in Spain, but that’s not where the story is set. This is part of the “campus slasher” sub-sub-genre, with most of the scenes taking place in and around an unnamed college in Boston, Massachusetts. This allows the killer to stalk characters through a variety of locations: classrooms, office rooms, the swimming pool area, the tennis courts, the training room (newly equipped with a waterbed), the library, the aerobics room, stairways... the scenes cover a lot of ground.
KILLER
The killer in this movie is a natural born maniac, as we learn from the opening sequence, which is set in Boston in 1942. A mother enters a room to find her young son Timmy putting together a jigsaw puzzle. It’s a happy moment – until the mother sees that the puzzle features a nude woman. The mother freaks out the kid, comparing him to his no-good father (who is serving in the military overseas) and smashing a mirror in the process.
Not happy about having his jigsaw puzzle taken away, little Timmy chops his mother to death with an axe, then cuts her body up with a hacksaw. When the police arrive on the bloody scene, the boy blames “a big man” for the murder.
Forty years later, the killer is working at that unnamed Boston university when he witnesses a young woman accidentally crash through a pane of glass while skateboarding. The smashed glass makes him flashback to the moment his mother broke the mirror and causes his bloodlust to re-emerge. He then sets out to murder multiple young women on the campus, taking a body part from each victim so he can assemble them into his own fleshy version of a jigsaw puzzle.
In addition to the black gloves, the killer wears a hat and coat while going after his victims, an outfit that pays homage to the pulp hero The Shadow.
Who is the killer? Anatomy teacher Professor Brown (Jack Taylor), who has a human skull in his classroom? Dean Reston (Edmund Purdom)? Hulking groundskeeper Willard (Paul Smith)? All is revealed in the exciting climax of Pieces.
FINAL GIRL
A TV regular throughout the ‘60s and ‘70s, including a 40+-episode run on Mission: Impossible, Lynda Day George was doing a lot of low-budget genre work around this time, appearing in the likes of Day of the Animals, Ants!, Beyond Evil, Mortuary, and more. She’s our final girl in this one – and her character isn’t a college coed, as you might expect, even if George was in her late thirties by this time. Instead, she plays tennis champion Mary Riggs, who now serves as a volunteer for the Boston police department. She takes an undercover gig at the college, working as the school tennis instructor but actually keeping an eye on things for the cops. She’s excited that this is going to be a dangerous job because she needs some excitement in her life. She gets plenty of excitement: not only does she fail to stop more murders from happening, she also gets attacked by Bruce Le for no reason at all.
Mary is a good character in theory, but rather ineffectual in practice. She solves the crime in the end, but bumbles into doing so accidentally and nearly loses her life. She does, however, earn a permanent place in the hearts and minds of many horror fans due to George’s performance when Mary comes across a murder scene and starts screaming out, calling the killer a “Bastard! Bastard!”
During her time at the college, Mary spends a good amount of time with the male lead, Ian Serra as campus stud Kendall James. Kendall was supposed to add Mary to his list of sexual conquests, but George refused to do the love scene... possibly because her husband, Christopher George, was also on set, playing local cop Lieutenant Bracken.
VICTIMS
This isn’t the sort of slasher where there’s a core group of potential victims waiting to get picked off one by one. Anybody on campus is a potential victim, and most of the women who get killed have barely been introduced before they’re removed from the picture. A girl is shown studying in an outdoor area, then her head gets lopped off. A girl invites Kendall to hook up with her in the school swimming pool, then gets killed before she can do any hooking up. An aerobics student gets stalked, then loses her arms when she catches a ride in the elevator with the killer. A girl plays some tennis, takes a shower, then she’s taken out.
Journalist Sylvia Costa (Isabelle Luque) has a couple of scenes before she gets killed, but still doesn’t make much of an impression.
The most shocking thing about the movie is the fact that the female student who delivers the unforgettable line “The most beautiful thing in the world is smoking pot and f*cking on a waterbed at the same time” is barely in the movie and doesn’t get killed.
DEATHS
As one of the taglines said, “You don’t need to go to Texas for a chainsaw massacre.”
Most of the victims in Pieces are taken out with a chainsaw. You get a chainsaw decapitation, a couple of chainsaw dismemberments, and a scene where a topless girl gets cut in half with the chainsaw. The movie really shines when barely-introduced characters are getting killed off.
Need some more variety? There’s the opening sequence axe murder of the killer’s mother, and the waterbed stabbing of the journalist. The killer gets stopped with a bullet to the head... and the most shocking moment comes at the very end.
CLICHÉS
Pieces is basically a buffet of classic slasher tropes that are often played completely straight, and sometimes pushed to the point of absurdity.
You have the traumatic background for the killer, the college campus full of doomed students, the killer’s POV shots, the black-gloved mystery killer, graphic murders, women constantly wandering off alone, gratuitous nudity, red herrings everywhere, possibly incompetent authority figures, the final reveal of the killer’s lair/project, a sudden shock ending, over-the-top dialogue and acting, and power tools as murder weapons.
What makes Pieces memorable is that it doesn’t just include these clichés but that it amplifies them to near self-parody levels.
POSTMORTEM
Simón said that his film was an instance of magical surrealism being used in service of a brilliant psychological idea, which reaches its culmination in the final moments, when it’s revealed that “the woman you think you want and spend your whole life building is a ball-buster.” He compared Pieces to the works of filmmaker Luis Buñuel and artist Francisco Goya, two of the most influential Spanish artists in history.
Of course, critics weren’t nearly as impressed by Simón’s film as they were by the works of Buñuel and Goya. Certain sections of society were appalled that it even existed. For example, conservative talk show host Wally George called Pieces pornography and wanted it to be banned. When drive-in movie critic Joe Bob Briggs gave the film a perfect 4-star review (despite, or possibly because of the fact that all of the actors turn in worst performances of their life), he had to face the wrath of the National Organization of Women. He released a statement explaining himself, saying that he was violently opposed to the random killing and mutilation of women unless it’s necessary to the plot.
Joe Bob is such a supporter of Pieces, he even chose it to be the last movie in his dusk-to-dawn-to-dusk Shudder marathon in 2018. That marathon turned out to be his triumphant comeback, but when he was choosing the movie and filming the show he thought it might be his last hosting gig ever. And if it was, Pieces was the movie he would have been satisfied going out on.
Pieces is ridiculous, but that’s it’s charm, as it’s a highly entertaining brand of ridiculousness.
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