Macabre…ish Horror Review: Pieces
Pieces, 1982/ 1 hr 26 min
Ten year old Timmy Reston (Alejandro Hernández) is abused and raged at by his angry mother (May Heatherly) who finds him doing a puzzle of a nude woman. She rages about his father and destroys his room looking for more ‘inappropriate’ material. After telling him to go get a trash bag, he returns with an axe and kills her, then a saw to hack her up. Meanwhile, downstairs, a woman obsessively rings the door bell, she enters with the police and finds the bloody bedroom, Timmy’s mom’s head is in one closet and a seemingly hysterical, Timmy, in another.
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Forty years later, a black clad person opens a box containing the bloody clothing and shoes of Mrs. Reston. Another box contains the puzzle of the nude woman and he begins to put the puzzle together.
A woman skating down the road, slams into a large mirror carried by movers and flashes to the mirror breaking during Mrs. Reston’s murder.
On a university lawn, a student doing homework is decapitated by a man with a chainsaw. Her body was discovered by the gardener, Willard (Paul L. Smith), but not her head. The police think it was probably done by a staffer and they interview the school faculty.
In the library, a girl, Susan, passes a note to a guy, Kendall (Ian Sera), inviting him to the pool later. The killer recovers the letter and gets to the pool before Kendall and while she’s swimming, he grabs her with the net and before she can completely recover from almost drowning, he returns with his chainsaw.
The man in black hauls a bloody bag of body parts to a freezer where he keeps his trophies.
Kendall, after being reminded about his date, runs to the pool. But Willard arrives to do his job and finds the bloody chainsaw and body parts minus the torso. The police also arrive and runs into Willard and a brawl breaks out before he’s contained and arrested.
Professor Brown (Jack Taylor) is asked his opinion about the manner of death because he’s an anthropologist. The police want to put undercover female police on the staff to possibly lure the killer out since he’s hunting women.
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Later, at a women’s dance class, the killer lurks. After one of the dancers takes a bathroom break, the killer, follows right behind her. He is thwarted by an unexpected guest and changes his mind.
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A former tennis star and current undercover cop, Ofc. Mary Riggs (Linda Day), will become the school’s new tennis coach. With the aid of Kendall, they will keep an eye out and try to catch the killer.
Meanwhile, every night, after every kill, the killer puts a little more of the puzzle together. Then he heads back to the dance studio and there, his original mark, is dancing by herself. And as she dresses to leave, he lets himself in just as she leaves through another door. She doesn’t see him but she’s spooked and runs for her life. Unfortunately, she’s cornered in the elevator and the man in black, saws her arms off.
But this time, Kendall and security hear the screams and break into the building. And it’s not too late, she lays armless but alive but alone in the elevator, the killer’s already gone. The police are getting desperate to find the culprit and ask Kendall to keep an eye out and protect the undercover cop, Mary Riggs.
One night, Kendall sees someone lurking outside behind Mary and hurriedly gets dressed to catch up to her. He’s following Ofc. Riggs who gets attacked by Chow (Bruce Le) the Kung Fu professor, Kendall arrives shortly after on his motorcycle after it’s mistaken for a chainsaw.
But another woman is also out and as Kendall drives off with Ofc. Riggs, the man in black approaches her with his chainsaw. She enters a building and he traps her inside, attacking her on a water bed with a knife. She fights hard but he overwhelms her, her lifeless body floats in a flooded room.
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The killer returns to his lair with his puzzle, both the regular one and the woman he’s piecing together.
Later the next day, after tennis practice, the killer cranks up loud music over the intercom and goes for the tennis player, Suzie (Leticia Marfil), while she showers in the locker room. Half dressed, she runs away but she’s locked in and she takes refuge in the restroom where he saws her in half, at the waist) taking her legs with him.
Willard takes Ofc. Riggs to turn off the music and Kendall hangs back at his office and looks around. He finds Suzy’s remains and he and Mary assume it was Willard who killed her.
Back at the killer’s freezer, he dresses a body up, that’s hanging on a wall, in Mrs. Reston’s bloody clothes but the shoes don’t fit.
Kendall, with Sgt. Holden (Frank Braña), researches the university faculty members to see who could be the culprit. And they figure it out!
Back at the dean’s house, Ofc. Riggs meets with him and he’s acting strange. While she drinks her coffee, she talks to him about Prof. Brown. She warns him that if they don’t find something soon, they’ll have to get a warrant, which makes him nervous and he keeps making her spiked coffee.
The dean (Edmund Purdom) once had his name legally changed, his name was once Timothy. Kendall rush off the rescue Riggs who is becoming paralyzed by the drug that’s in her coffee. The dean wants to cut her feet off so they’ll fit in his mother’s shoes.
The police kick in the door and the dean is gone but Mary is still on the couch, paralyzed. She desperately tries to signal with her eyes where he is. The dean jumps out and Kendall fights with him while Mary tries to fight her paralysis. The cops, one of them, Sgt. Holden, return to put a bullet in the dean’s head. They search the property while Kendall tends to Mary.
While looking over the puzzle, the bookcase spins and a patchwork corpse falls from it’s hook on the other side, right on top of Kendall.