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+.
Editorials
The Lovecraftian Behemoth in ‘Underwater’ Remains One of the Coolest Modern Monster Reveals
One of the most important elements of delivering a memorable movie monster is the reveal. It’s a pivotal moment that finally sees the threat reveal itself in full to its prey, often heralding the final climactic confrontation, which can make or break a movie monster. It’s not just the creature effects and craftmanship laid bare; a monster’s reveal means the horror is no longer up to the viewer’s imagination.
When to reveal the monstrous threat is just as important as HOW, and few contemporary creature features have delivered a monster reveal as surprising or as cool as 2020’s Underwater.
The Setup
Director William Eubank’s aquatic creature feature, written by Brian Duffield (No One Will Save You) and Adam Cozad (The Legend of Tarzan), is set around a deep water research and drilling facility, Kepler 822, at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, sometime in the future. Almost straight away, a seemingly strong earthquake devastates the facility, creating lethal destruction and catastrophic system failures that force a handful of survivors to trek across the sea floor to reach safety. But their harrowing survival odds get compounded when the group realizes they’re under siege by a mysterious aquatic threat.
The group is comprised of mechanical engineer Norah Price (Kristen Stewart), Captain Lucien (Vincent Cassel), biologist Emily (Jessica Henwick), Emily’s engineer boyfriend Liam (John Gallagher Jr.), and crewmates Paul (T.J. Miller) and Rodrigo (Mamadou Athie).
Eubank toggles between survival horror and creature feature, with the survivors constantly facing new harrowing obstacles in their urgent bid to find an escape pod to the surface. The slow, arduous one-mile trek between Kepler 822 and Roebuck 641 comes with oxygen worries, extreme water pressure that crushes in an instant, and the startling discovery of a new aquatic humanoid species- one that happens to like feasting on human corpses. Considering the imploding research station, the Mariana Trench just opened a human buffet.
The Monster Reveal
For two-thirds of Underwater’s runtime, Eubank delivers a nonstop ticking time bomb of extreme survival horror as everything attempts to prevent the survivors from reaching their destination. That includes the increasingly pesky monster problem. Eubank shows these creatures piecemeal, borrowing a page from Alien by giving glimpses of its smaller form first, then quick flashes of its mature state in the pitch-black darkness of the deep ocean.
The third act arrives just as Norah reaches the Roebuck, but not before she must trudge through a dense tunnel of sleeping humanoids. Eubank treats this like a full monster reveal, with Stewart’s Norah facing an intense gauntlet of hungry creatures. She’s even partially swallowed and forced to channel her inner Ellen Ripley to make it through and inside to safety.
Yet, it’s not the true monster reveal here. It’s only once the potential for safety is finally in sight that Eubank pulls the curtain back to reveal the cause behind the entire nightmare: the winged Behemoth, Cthulhu. Suddenly, the tunnel of humanoid creatures moves away, revealing itself to be an appendage for a gargantuan creature. Norah sends a flare into the distance, briefly lighting the tentacled face of an ancient entity.
It’s not just the overwhelming vision of this massive, Lovecraftian entity that makes its reveal so memorable, but the retroactive story implications it creates. Cthulhu’s emerging presence, awakened by the relentless drilling at the deepest depths of the ocean, was behind the initial destruction that destroyed Kepler 822. More importantly, Eubank confirmed that the Behemoth is indeed Cthulhu, which means that the humanoid creatures stalking the survivors are Deep Ones. What makes this even more fascinating is that the choice to give the Big Bad Behemoth a Lovecraftian identity wasn’t part of the script. Eubank revealed in an older interview with Bloody Disgusting how the creature quietly evolved into Cthulhu.
The Death Toll
Just how deadly is Cthulhu? Well, that depends. Most of the on-screen deaths in Underwater are environmental, with implosions and water pressure taking out most of the characters we meet. The Deep Ones are first discovered munching on the corpse of an unidentified crew member, and soon after, kill and eat Paul in a gruesome fashion. Lucien gets dragged out into the open depths by a Deep One in a group attack but sacrifices himself via his pressurized suit to save his team from getting devoured.
The on-screen kill count at the hands of this movie monster and its minions is pretty minimal, but the news article clippings shown over the end credits do hint toward the larger impact. Two large deepsea stations were eviscerated by the emergence of Cthulhu, causing an undisclosed countless number of deaths right at the start of the film.
Norah gives her life to stop Cthulhu and save her remaining crewmates, but the Great Old One isn’t so easily vanquished. While the Behemoth may not have slaughtered many on screen here, his off-screen kill count through sheer destruction is likely impressive.
But the takeaway here is that Underwater ends in such a way that the Lovecraftian deity may only be at the start of a new reign of terror now that he’s awake.
The Impact
Neither Underwater or Cthulhu overstay their welcome here. Eubank shows just enough of his Behemoth to leave a lasting impression, without showing too much to ruin the mystery. The nonstop sense of urgency and survival complications only further the fast-paced thrills.
The result is a movie monster we’d love to see more from, and for horror fans, there’s no greater compliment than that.
Where to Watch
Underwater is currently available to stream on Tubi and FX Now.
It’s also available on Blu-ray, DVD, and Digital.
In television, “Monster of the Week” refers to the one-off monster antagonists featured in a single episode of a genre series. The popular trope was originally coined by the writers of 1963’s The Outer Limits and is commonly employed in The X-Files, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and so much more. Pitting a series’ protagonists against featured creatures offered endless creative potential, even if it didn’t move the serialized storytelling forward in huge ways. Considering the vast sea of inventive monsters, ghouls, and creatures in horror film and TV, we’re borrowing the term to spotlight horror’s best on a weekly basis.
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