Pieces: The Chainsaw Slasher Whose Tagline Says It All

“You don’t have to go to Texas for a chainsaw massacre!”

Every discussion of Pieces (1982) starts with the tagline, and that is correct, because the tagline is the film’s thesis statement, business plan and artistic manifesto in one line. It is openly admitting that it exists downstream of a better film. It is promising you the same thing, closer to home, with less trouble. And it is doing so with a cheerful shamelessness that turns out to be the most honest thing in ninety minutes of a picture that is otherwise pathologically dishonest about everything.

The result is one of the strangest objects in the slasher cycle: a film made in Madrid, set in Boston, financed across two countries, directed by a Spaniard with a background in fantasy adventure, populated by American character actors and Spanish crew, dubbed within an inch of its life, and assembled with a disregard for logic so total that it arrives back around at a kind of purity.

What it actually is

A prologue in 1942: a boy is caught with a jigsaw puzzle of a nude woman by his mother, who reacts with such violence that the boy responds with an axe. Forty years on, someone at a Boston university is killing young women with a chainsaw and removing a specific body part from each one.

He is assembling something. The film tells you this immediately. It has no interest in the mystery of what — that is given away in the title, the poster, the prologue and the tagline — and only a nominal interest in the mystery of who.

Around this, the film deploys a police investigation of surpassing incompetence, a dean (Edmund Purdom), a groundskeeper (Paul L. Smith) who is filmed exclusively as though he is about to bite someone, an anatomy professor, a tennis-playing undercover officer, and Christopher George as the lieutenant, doing exactly the professional, unbothered work he did in a hundred films of this type.

Why it works: the giallo underneath the slasher

Here is the argument for Pieces being more than a curiosity. Strip the chainsaw and the American campus, and the film’s actual mechanics are Italian.

The killer is a black-gloved figure whose identity is withheld and whose motive is a childhood sexual trauma. The murders are set pieces, staged for composition and colour rather than suspense, and they arrive on a schedule that has nothing to do with the plot. The police procedure exists to move the film between killings. The psychology is a Freudian cartoon delivered in a single expository lump near the end. Every one of those is a giallo convention, and Simón is executing them with the fluency of someone who had watched a great many of them.

What he does not have is a giallo’s visual discipline. Argento’s murders are choreographed; the camera is an accomplice with a point of view. Simón’s are simply lit and then executed, in bright, hard, unatmospheric light, at length, with a chainsaw. The absence of style produces an effect that the stylists never achieved: the killings feel less like cinema and more like an industrial process. There is no beauty to distract you from the butchery. A giallo murder is an aria. A Pieces murder is a task being completed.

Whether that is craft or accident is unanswerable, and after forty years the answer has stopped being interesting. The effect is in the film.

The one genuine directorial flourish is the waterbed sequence, and it earns its reputation — a murder staged so that the room fills with liquid, the geometry of the killing dictated by the furniture. It is the only moment where Simón appears to be composing rather than recording, and it suggests a filmmaker who could have done this consistently if anyone had asked him to.

Madrid playing Boston

The geography deserves its own paragraph, because it is the most consistently funny thing in the film and it is also a real piece of film history.

Pieces is set at a Boston university and was shot substantially in Madrid, with some American exterior coverage stitched in. The production makes no serious attempt to close the gap. The architecture is wrong. The light is wrong — Madrid sun has a hardness that New England simply does not do, and the film is full of Bostonian students squinting in it. The cars, the signage, the way the extras hold themselves, the shape of the campus: all of it belongs to a different continent, and the film addresses this by putting the word “Boston” in the dialogue and moving on.

This was standard practice in the co-production era and it is the reason so many early-80s exploitation films have a dislocated, dreamlike quality that their makers never intended. Money came from several countries; each country’s investors wanted their people employed; the setting was whichever place the American distributor could sell. What arrives on screen is a nowhere — a composite country assembled from whatever was available, populated by actors who were not in the same room as each other and voices that were recorded months later in a third city.

The horror-film payoff is accidental and real. A slasher depends on the audience believing in a place — the camp, the town, the sorority house — because the killer’s power comes from knowing that place better than the victims do. Pieces has no place. Its campus has no coherent layout; corridors do not connect to the rooms they should connect to; distances change between shots. The killer is therefore not stalking a geography. He simply appears wherever a woman is alone, because the film has no map to constrain him. Simón did not build that. The co-production system did.

The collector’s cross-reference

The tagline names the ancestor, and the tagline is lying. Pieces has almost nothing in common with The Texas Chain Saw Massacre beyond the tool. Hooper’s film is a documentary lie — grimy, sweaty, apparently unauthored, terrifying because it feels found. Pieces is glossy, dubbed, artificial in every frame, and terrifying to nobody. Borrowing the chainsaw was a marketing decision made by people who understood exactly which two words on a poster sold tickets in 1982.

The real ancestors are Italian, and the family tree runs through Bava’s Blood and Black Lace — the film that established the body-count structure with a masked killer and a series of beautiful women dispatched in beautiful rooms — and out into the whole business of the giallo’s fingerprints on the modern slasher. Pieces is what happens when that Italian inheritance passes through Spain and is then sold to America using Texan branding.

Follow Simón forwards and you get Slugs (1988), another film where his sincere, straight-faced approach to an absurd premise produces something no ironist could manufacture. That sincerity is the thread. He was never winking.

The case against

Pieces is, by any conventional measure, badly made, and the people who love it should say so rather than pretending the incoherence is a strategy.

The dubbing severs every performance from its body. The dialogue is functionally nonsense in places — the notorious line about chop suey being the most quoted example, delivered after a scene so unmotivated that it appears to have been shot for a different film and inserted here by mistake. The investigation makes no sense. Characters behave in ways that no person has ever behaved. The film’s attitude to its female victims is exactly what you would expect from a Spanish exploitation picture in 1982, which is to say the camera’s interest in them is undisguised and it does not survive a modern viewing comfortably.

And the misogyny is baked into the premise, so there is no reading it out. A man is cutting women into components in order to build a woman. The film finds this idea more entertaining than horrifying.

Watch it anyway, with your eyes open about what you are watching. Pieces survives because it is one of the few films where every decision was made by someone who genuinely did not care whether it made sense, and that produces a texture that no amount of competence can imitate. There are films that fail. There are films that succeed. Pieces is doing a third thing.

Where to find it

It has been restored with more love and more supplementary material than almost any film of its budget class, and it appears regularly on the horror streaming services. Watch the English dub — the Spanish version exists, but the dub is the film for anyone who found it through the video shops, and its wrongness is load-bearing.

Spoilers below

The killer is the dean, Edmund Purdom, and the film’s identification of him is one of the flattest reveals in the cycle — he is essentially the only person left. The film has spent ninety minutes gesturing at the groundskeeper, who has been photographed as a suspect so aggressively that the misdirection curdles into insult, and then discards him.

The jigsaw is completed. The final image of the assembled body is exactly the thing the film has been promising since its title card, and it is delivered with a plainness that is somehow more disturbing than a flourish would have been.

Then there is the last shot, which is the reason the film has the reputation it has. After the killer is dealt with and the survivors are standing in the room, the assembled corpse performs an act of genital violence on a male character, in a single insert, with no setup and no consequence, and then the film ends.

It is unmotivated by anything. It is impossible within the film’s own logic. It is a non-sequitur pasted on to the end of a picture that had, by its own standards, actually resolved. Reportedly the producers wanted one more shock and Simón gave them one.

That shot is what Pieces is. Ninety minutes of a film pretending to be a coherent American slasher, and then, in the last ten seconds, the mask comes off and it admits it was only ever a delivery system for things you cannot unsee. The tagline told you. It was closer to home, and it was less trouble, and it was never going to be Texas.