Editorials
[Butcher Block] Going to ‘Pieces’ Over J. Piquer Simon’s Gory Slasher
Butcher Block is a weekly series celebrating horror’s most extreme films and the minds behind them. Dedicated to graphic gore and splatter, each week will explore the dark, the disturbed, and the depraved in horror, and the blood and guts involved. For the films that use special effects of gore as an art form, and the fans that revel in the carnage, this series is for you.
Juan Piquer Simon’s exploitation slasher has a bonkers reputation that precedes it, delivering one of horror’s most entertaining audience experiences of all time. The tagline, “It’s exactly what you think it is!” only scratches the surface of the weirdness within. Sure, you get exactly what you expect in terms of gore when it features a jigsaw puzzle-obsessed killer with a chainsaw, but the execution is so over the top there’s nothing that really prepares you for the madness within.
Simon was initially approached to helm The Last House on the Left sequel, but passed because the script he was offered seemed too boring. Then he was offered a 30-page treatment for Pieces, then titled Jigsaw, an intended to be a made for TV movie. It was so insane that not only was he intrigued, he was determined to make the script believable. Which makes me wonder just how insane this synopsis actually was on paper, because the final film is far from believable.
Opening with a 10-year old Timmy assembling a jigsaw puzzle of a nude woman, his mother walks in and yells at him about it. In response, he grabs an axe and hacks her to bits. The police find him in a closet, covered in his mother’s blood, and he blames some mysterious intruder for the murder. Cut to 40 years later, an unseen Timmy unboxes that same puzzle, and a wave of murders at a college campus begins anew, with the police stumped by the grisly murders.
On paper, that sounds normal enough, but what transpires is anything but normal. It’s a whodunnit type slasher where the story doesn’t really seem interested in the mystery. The red herring is arrested immediately, without even giving much reason as to why they were a suspect in the first place. You get so caught up in the violent dismemberments that you forget you’re supposed to wonder who’s behind The Shadow inspired disguise. There’s also one of horror’s most infamous scenes randomly injected in the film; the kung fu instructor battling one of the undercover cops in the middle of the night for no reason at all, other than producer/co-writer Dick Randall also happened to be producing many Bruce Lee type martial arts films and Simon wanted to pad out the runtime when actress Linda Day refused to do a sex scene.
Most surprising of all, though, is that for how gory the film is, the body count is surprisingly low. Including the opening scene, Timmy racks up a kill count of 7 dismembered victims. But every single one amasses a ton of blood and gore, as taking chainsaws to limbs is apt to do, and most of the gore effects involved pig carcasses and real slaughterhouse blood and organs.
There’s been a long-standing rumor that part of why Pieces is so over the top gory is because one of the writers is Joe D’Amato, of Video Nasty Anthropophagus infamy. It’s an unsubstantiated rumor, with Simon confirming in multiple interviews that D’Amato hadn’t been involved in the film. Dick Randall did co-write with Roberto Loyola, though, an Italian producer, writer, and director with a talent for casting Giallo films.
Pieces has everything you could ever hope for in exploitation slasher cinema. Gratuitous nudity (both male and female), insane carnage, goofy dialogue like “BASTARD! BAAAAASTAAARD! BASTAAARD!” and an overall sense of gleeful reckless abandon makes for a film that’s one of the goriest slashers of the ‘80s, but one that still makes for a perfect crowd pleaser 36 years later. The insane final shot of the film proves it.
It’s been 75 years since The Thing From Another World first warned us to “watch the skies”, and filmgoers have done just that by showing up to multiple instances of extraterrestrial contact on the big screen. This makes sense, as a recent CBS news poll estimated that 63% of Americans believe in intelligent life on other planets, and the ongoing disclosure movement aims to raise that number with each passing day.
With Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day leaving many genre fans hungry for more alien footage (preferably of the spooky variety), today I’d like to share a list recommending six underrated alien invasion thrillers for your viewing pleasure. After all, regardless of whether or not you believe that we’re alone in the universe, it can be fun to dream about the worst-case scenario if our cosmic neighbors ever decide to visit.
For the purposes of this list, we’ll be focusing on lesser-known invasion stories rather than the popular extraterrestrials of franchises like Alien and Close Encounters of the Third (or even Fourth) Kind. That being said, don’t forget to comment below with your own alien favorites if you think we missed a particularly thrilling movie.
While it won’t be featured in this article, I’d highly recommend checking out Dean Alioto’s UFO Abduction/The McPherson Tape if you’re up for some ufology-inspired found footage thrills.
With that out of the way, onto the list!
6. The Arrival (1996)
Not to be confused with Denis Villeneuve’s Academy Award-winning Amy Adams vehicle about learning to communicate peacefully with extraterrestrial life, David Twohy’s The Arrival is a much more straightforward (but no less entertaining) genre romp where Charlie Sheen faces a global conspiracy involving hostile alien invaders.
It’s not exactly up there with Close Encounters or even Independence Day, but Twohy’s conspiratorial thriller plays out like an exceptionally fun episode of The X-Files that I’d recommend to sci-fi/horror fans who don’t mind a little bit of wonky CGI and 90s excess alongside their alien thrills.
5. Extraterrestrial (2014)
The Vicious Brothers made a name for themselves with the success of 2011’s Grave Encounters, but that was far from the Canadian duo’s only collaboration. And while it’s not exactly a fan favorite, I always point out 2014’s Extraterrestrial as one of their most underrated projects simply because I agree with the filmmakers’ opinion that there aren’t enough ‘cool alien abduction movies’ out there.
Admittedly, the majority of the picture functions like a run-of-the-mill creature feature with paper-thin characters and familiar horror tropes, but I’d argue that the cosmically-terrifying final act elevates the experience to new and memorable heights. The movie also boasts great performances by both Michael Ironside and Emily Perkins – a combination that more than makes up for the occasionally janky CGI.
4. Alien Raiders (2008)
Director Ben Rock has gone on record lamenting how his John-Carpenter-inspired creature feature was forcefully renamed from Supermarket to the painfully obvious Alien Raiders (a change which likely resulted in many potential viewers skipping out on the experience), but the new title doesn’t change the fact that this single-location thriller is something of a hidden gem.
Taking place entirely within a supermarket, Alien Raiders tells the story of an ensemble of customers and employees who are taken hostage by a group of armed men looking for something far more dangerous than an easy payout. I won’t get into details in order to avoid spoiling the experience, but I’d highly recommend this criminally underseen flick to fans of John Carpenter and the Resident Evil games.
3. Phoenix Forgotten (2017)
You’d think that a Ridley-Scott-produced retelling of one of the most infamous real-life UFO sightings of all time would have a bigger following, but I rarely see Justin Barber’s Found Footage period piece brought up during discussions about extraterrestrial-focused horror movies.
This is a huge shame, as Phoenix Forgotten is just as spooky as it is convincing, with this well-researched dive into the Phoenix Lights incident benefiting from surprisingly believable special effects as well as an appropriately horrific finale.
2. Communion (1989)
I wouldn’t blame you for disregarding Whitley Strieber’s controversial book about his alleged close encounter as sensationalist slop, but I’d argue that Phillipe Mora’s 1989 adaptation of these events is much better than the source material. After all, the movie works as a standalone piece of speculative fiction while also benefiting from an incredible performance by the one and only Christopher Walken!
Mora’s take on Communion may not be particularly scary, but the film is still an unforgettable character study regardless of whether or not the abduction really happened. Not only that, but the flick also paved the way for plenty of future sci-fi stories where the extraterrestrial invaders aren’t as evil as they initially appear.
1. Altered (2006)
Originally envisioned as a Sam Raimi-style horror-comedy titled Probed, Eduardo Sánchez (of The Blair Witch Project fame) eventually realized that it would be much more interesting to turn the film into a serious exploration of the emotional aftermath of a traumatic abduction incident.
That’s how we got Altered, a clever inversion of the standard abduction narrative that follows a group of troubled friends as they capture and experiment on an alien in order to enact revenge for their own abduction years prior.
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