Here's an exercise in cinema that's pure trash, but pure enjoyable trash at that. Yes it's another slasher film, but somehow, maybe since it's a Spanish/Puerto Rican production which often plays like a very violent giallo, it seems a little more than just routine. Helmed by the same guy who gave us MYSTERY ON MONSTER ISLAND and SLUGS, and written by the sleaze-team of director Piquer (uncredited), Joe D'Amato and Dick Randall (FRANKENSTEIN'S CASTLE OF FREAKS), who also was a producer, PIECES is a must for Euro horror fans, even if you have a low tolerance for the slasher trend of the early 1980s. Previously available in unauthorized versions from several budget DVD companies, Grindhouse Releasing finally delivers the official, definitive edition of PIECES that we’ve all been waiting for!

In the pre-credit opening (very disturbing and reminiscent of Dario Argento's DEEP RED), we go back to the early 1940s to see a perverted little boy putting together a very late 1970s looking puzzle of a totally nude pin-up model. When his overbearing mother catches wind of this, she has a shit fit, but before she can trash his porn paraphernalia, the tyke hacks her to bits. He then proceeds to assemble the blood-filled puzzle just before a nosy neighbor arrives with the police to find the boy hiding in the closet, pretending to be in a state of shock.

Forty years later, we arrive at a Boston college where the co-eds smoke grass and converse about having sex on waterbeds. On this campus, there's a chainsaw killer stalking pretty girls, and the film wastes no time displaying luscious nude bodies being chopped to bits. A cop arrives on the scene (a cigar-chopping, trench-coated Christopher George during his late 1970s/early 1980s low budget exploitation salad days) but is baffled by the vast assortment of red herrings that the university has to offer, including Spanish sleaze regular Jack Taylor as a professor who lives with his mother, Edmund Purdom as the English-accented dean and a landscaper in the form of big, bearded Paul Smith (who makes the most hysterical mugs for the camera), the actor best known for playing Bluto (a role he was born to play) in Robert Altman's POPEYE. Frank Brana (RETURN OF THE BLIND DEAD), a veteran of Spanish exploitation films, plays George’s sidekick and has some of the best lines.

PIECES includes a fun cast of mostly American and English stars, a nerdy looking "stud" student (Ian Sera, the hero of MYSTERY ON MONSTER ISLAND) that turns out to be a hero, pretty gals prancing around naked, Christopher's then wife Susan Day George, who gets to profoundly overact (watch her reaction after a girl is slaughtered in a shower... "bastard!!"), and just enough gore (some truly well-crafted gross-out effects) to cause the MPAA to let the film be released unrated when it played American theaters, where it became something of a box office hit in late 1983. The surprise ending owes a lot to Narcisco Ibanez Serrandor's THE HOUSE THAT SCREAMED, but the final shot was totally unnecessary and reflects the type of stupidity that would be a mainstay in horror films throughout the rest of the decade and the years that followed.

Anyone who remembers how PIECES looked on the dark transfer used for the mid 1980s Vestron VHS video release, or owned any of the various unauthorized DVD versions, will be pleased at how good the film looks here, while still preserving that “grindhouse” look. Presenting it in a 1.66:1 aspect ratio with anamorphic enhancement, the hi-definition transfer is mostly clean and blemish free, with surprisingly strong colors and only smidgens of grain every so often. Three audio options are offered, the first being a serviceable International English track used for the American release, which maintains the original voices of some of the main cast members and the sleazy slasher-appropriate library music by CAM. A Spanish language track offers a much different piano-dominated score by Librado Pastor, and “The Vine Theater Experience” was recorded at a 2002 theatrical screening at the Vine Theater in Hollywood. The expectedly rowdy audience hoots and hollers at lines like, “The most beautiful thing in the world is smoking pot and f**king on a water bed at the same time.”