Famous for having arguably the best tagline in the history of
low-budget exploitation horror (“It’s exactly what you think it is!”),
Pieces (a.k.a. The Night Has 1,000 Screams in its original Spanish
version) borrows heavily from the Italian giallo tradition, but
possesses an insanity wholly its own. The story is pure paint-by-numbers
horror: After the requisite flashback scene in which a disturbed young
boy kills his mother, the film picks up 40 years later on a Boston
college campus, where the now-grown child is an unidentified killer
offing young women and removing their body parts, according to some
deranged logic that lines up with an old jigsaw puzzle of a nude woman.
Campus playboy Kendall (Ian Sera) is quickly pegged as a suspect when
one of his paramours becomes a victim, and he joins a “who’s the
killer?” roster that includes an awkward professor (Jack Taylor), a
menacing gardener (Paul Smith, who played Bluto in Robert Altman’s
Popeye and whose bug-eyed mugging suggests he never left the character
behind), and others. Police lieutenant Bracken (Christopher George)
arranges to place Mary Riggs (Linda Day) undercover as a tennis
instructor at the school, and from there, the murders—primarily via
chainsaw—really begin.