Like a lot of followers of exploitation cinema, I got my start getting stoned in my dorm, watching shitty horror movies with my friends. I can, therefore, remember my first viewing of “Pieces,” how the VHS box beckoned to me, with it’s pulpy tag-line promise, “It’s exactly what you think it is!” 

It was 1996, and the idea of packing a rep theater with “Troll 2” or an amateur cult item like “Birdemic: Shock and Terror” was in my mind unthinkable. “Pieces,” a shitty slasher film, forgotten, relegated to the dustbin of Mike’s Video’s 52-cent-a-night horror section, was an irresistible catch. Likely to be seen by me and my friends alone. We had no idea that Bittorrent and DVD and boutique video labels would make even our most obscure desires a reality. We felt then that we were exploring something forgotten, something that would reveal its secret artistry, discernible to us only.

But in this case no such thing existed.

“Pieces” or “Mil Gritos Tiene la Noche” (“The Night has a Thousand Cries”) is a low-budget 1982 Spanish knockoff of “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.” It is also awful, firmly in so-bad-it’s-good territory. It’s littered with cheap red-karo-syrup makeup effects, terrible dialogue, leaden “acting” and crummy dubbing, all in service of a truly nonsensical story. The only entertainment value to be found is, indeed, in laughing hysterically at how inept and silly the whole thing is.

A little boy clandestinely assembles a jigsaw puzzle of a naked babe when he’s interrupted by his obviously insane mother, who immediately threatens to burn all of the boy’s belongings. Before she can get started, he puts an axe blade between her eyeballs. Believing the murder to be a random killing, the cops send the boy away with relatives.

Cut to “FORTY YEARS LATER” (or “ORTY YEARS” as the title card on the old poorly cropped VHS copy used to read). The now grown boy’s murderous urges are reignited when he sees a lovely young coed accidentally skateboard through a plate glass mirror. Our mysterious killer sets about a literal chainsaw massacre, slicing up sexually promiscuous aerobics instructors or the occasional topless swimmer.

Meanwhile the crimes are investigated by the utterly clueless trio of a smarmy police detective (Christopher George), an easily-frightened teacher (Lynda Day) and a dopey student who fancies himself an amateur crimesolver (Ian Sera). The prime suspect, at least at the outset, is unsurprisingly the campus groundstender, Groundskeeper Willard, a burly bearded man (played by Paul Smith, who portrayed The Beast Rabban in Lynch’s “Dune”. Presumably he is not Scottish, though) who is frequently seen cooing over his chainsaw and claiming that he has “work to do.”

The investigation proceeds accordingly. The Dean claims that the University administration wants to cover up the crimes and avoid bad publicity, though it’s never stated just how they plan to hide a chainsaw-wielding serial killer on a bustling college campus, but I think it has to do with the crusty Dean not wanting some pesky cops running around “spying” on his students. Further, he murderer proves to be weirdly efficient, at one point subduing a swimming girl with a pool net and chainsawing her into parts only after she’s unconscious. There’s an unintentional running gag wherein there are always loud noises or lots of background commotion happening whenever the killer strikes, explaining why nobody seems to notice a buzzing chainsaw. At one point the lead detective asks for a student’s thoughts on a murder scene, saying “I don’t want to wait for the coroner’s opinion.”

I haven’t even mentioned the inexplicable scene in which our characters are confronted by an angry martial artist. I’m lead to believe that the producers of the film had this actor/fighter under contract, and decided to unceremoniously slip him into the film for no clear reason.

But that’s enough plot summary. The point is that “Pieces,” as much as I wished it to be otherwise, is a shockingly inept piece of exploitation cinema. At best it’s good for a few chuckles, aided of course by your substance of choice, but at worst (which is obviously most of the time) it’s a cynical cash in. Even the tagline, “You don’t have to go to Texas for a Chainsaw Massacre,” is just name-dropping. The best grindhouse movies have a beating heart, a love of genre, or even just a couple of good ideas.

Of course, it’s folly to expect a film like this to not be in the business of making a quick and dirty buck, but did it have to be so dispassionate? Even the silliest Italian horror films tend have a deluded auteur at the helm to claim some sort of thematic coherence or hidden agenda: just look at the director of “Troll 2” and the unsung hero of recent roadshow hit “Best Worst Movie,” Claudio Fragasso. Claudio has made one of the most inexplicably popular terrible films of all time, yet he sticks to his guns and insists he knew what he was doing. He maybe completely out of his mind, but at least he fucking means it.

And in a way that’s the sort of sincerity a movie like “Pieces” sorely lacks. Nobody was dying to get this film out of their system. I had hopes that revisiting a work like this, something I once found charmingly goofy, would reveal to me what I initially fell in love with in exploitation cinema, what the seeds of my obsession were. Instead I found something completely charmless. I don’t really believe in the “so bad it’s good” movie any more, because if the only thing you can do with a film is laugh at it, what’s the point?

Here’s a bunch of “Pieces” related ephemera.