Editorials
The Best Gore Movies You Need to See: ‘Pieces’ (1982) Delivers a Real Chainsaw Massacre
Juan Piquer Simón’s exploitation slasher Pieces (1982) 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 in this tale of 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 unique brand of madness.
Simon was initially approached to helm a sequel to Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left, but passed because the script he was offered seemed too boring. Then he was offered a 30-page treatment for Pieces, then titled Jigsaw, intended at the time 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.
Pieces puts together 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; a kung fu instructor battling an undercover cop in the middle of the night for no reason at all. Story goes that producer/co-writer Dick Randall happened to be producing many Bruce Lee type martial arts films at the time and Simón wanted to pad out the runtime. Insert random nonsense. Cut and print.
Most surprising of all, though, is that for how gory the film is, the body count in Pieces is surprisingly low. Including the opening scene, Timmy racks up a kill count of 7 dismembered victims, a few less than the original Friday the 13th a couple years prior; on that note, keep your eyes peeled for an original Friday the 13th one sheet hidden in this very movie. But every single murder amasses a ton of blood and gore, as taking chainsaws to limbs is apt to do, and most of the gore effects involved actual 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 Anthropophagus infamy. It’s an unsubstantiated rumor, with Juan Piquer Simón confirming in multiple interviews that D’Amato hadn’t been involved in the film at all. Dick Randall did co-write with Roberto Loyola, however, an Italian producer, writer, and director with a talent for casting Giallo films. That influence is very much felt here.
Pieces has everything you could ever hope for in exploitation slasher cinema. Gratuitous nudity (both male and female), insane carnage, goofy dialogue, and an overall sense of gleeful reckless abandon makes for a film that’s one of the goriest slashers of the ‘80s, and still a perfect crowd pleaser over 40 years later.
Just wait until you see the insane final shot, which led to Eli Roth calling the bonkers and totally unexpected finale of 1982’s Pieces “the greatest ending in horror history.”
Pieces is now streaming on SCREAMBOX, Shudder, Tubi, Peacock and AMC+.
Judging from the unprecedented box office success of Kane Parsons’ Backrooms adaptation, you’ve likely already seen the liminal horror hit that managed to make audiences afraid of empty hallways and bad wallpaper. And now that so many of us have already entered the yellow labyrinth (some of us more than once), the time has come to discuss the spoiler-filled details that make the movie so fascinating in the first place.
And if there’s one element here that makes the Backrooms movie stand out from any previous lore/mythology, it has to be the genius addition of the Still Life entities. Warped recreations of real people that somehow wandered into the Complex, these misremembered creatures are responsible for some of the most disturbing imagery of 2026 – as well as laugh-out-loud memes created by one of the film’s very own concept artists.
However, true to Parsons’ word that the movie would rely heavily on practical effects, each of these distorted monsters was brought to life by real actors under heavy layers of makeup and prosthetics (with the occasional splash of CGI enhancements). While Anora and If I Had Legs I’d Kick You actress Ivy Wolk wasn’t among these performers, despite what Letterboxd might have you believe, the creature cast did benefit from veteran players with plenty of genre experience.
For starters, Alien: Romulus alumni Robert Bobroczkyi (who previously brought that film’s horrific Offspring to life during its most memorable sequence) plays the flick’s main antagonist, the Still Life version of Captain Clark. And though there was some obvious CGI involved in making the character’s peg-leg and nightmarish face more believable, Bobroczkyi’s monstrous performance and his natural 7’7″ frame helped to make that final chase sequence a clear highlight among this year’s genre offerings.
The film’s Texas-Chain-Saw-inspired “dinner” scene also features a freaky collection of less-aggressive Still Life creatures in the form of the Bearded Man, the Red-Headed Woman and, strangest of them all, the cheekily named “Archibald Leland Sutter Still Life” (who earned this title among fans and crewmembers as a reference to his apparent affinity for lamps).
While this was the first major horror outing for both Patrick Baynham (The Bearded Man) and Dana Mahmood (Archibald), Rhiannon Roberts has worked as a stunt performer in everything from Yellowjackets to HBO’s The Last of Us adaptation – which is probably why The Red-Headed Woman is the most active out of Clark’s impromptu “family.” That being said, the Archibald Leland Sutter Still Life is my personal favorite of the bunch simply because his anachronistic outfit suggests that the Backrooms phenomenon might be a lot older than the Async Foundation. I also love how hard he tries to be helpful with that little light of his!
That might be it for the Still Life entities, but I think horror fans will also be pleased to hear that the film’s Found Footage prologue stars none other than Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City star Avan Jogia as Naren Warne – and American Mary herself Katharine Isabelle also shows up in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo at Mary’s house party towards the middle of the story (though I have a feeling that she originally had a bigger part that was likely cut for time).
At the end of the day, Parsons’ Backrooms may have been an auteur-driven project motivated by the young director’s unique take on the classic creepypasta, but film has always been a collective artform, so it’s fun to see just how many talented performers it takes to bring this kind of supernatural nightmare to life in a way that connects with so many people.
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