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.
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.
- 2/22/2024
- by Meagan Navarro
- bloody-disgusting.com
Those scurrilous Italian ‘mondo’ films are difficult to see in original versions; this Something Weird double bill yields an American hybrid of one of the better (?) examples, given the classy touch of a narration by George Sanders. A second oversexed pseudo-docu is a homegrown mongrel with all the credibility of today’s Reality TV — it doesn’t even try to be legit. Once again, Severin comes through with a doubly guilty pleasure, for sex-starved carnival suckers everywhere.
Ecco + The Forbidden
Blu-ray
Severin Films/Something Weird
1962/65 + 1966
Street Date January 29, 2019
29.98
Severin Films has released two Something Weird ‘Mondo’ double bills on Blu-ray, that came out on DVD thirteen years ago on the Image label. One of the few genres of exploitation film that still receives little or no serious criticism is an infestation series of opportunistic faux- documentaries borne from the massive success of 1962’s Mondo Cane. These pictures do have a...
Ecco + The Forbidden
Blu-ray
Severin Films/Something Weird
1962/65 + 1966
Street Date January 29, 2019
29.98
Severin Films has released two Something Weird ‘Mondo’ double bills on Blu-ray, that came out on DVD thirteen years ago on the Image label. One of the few genres of exploitation film that still receives little or no serious criticism is an infestation series of opportunistic faux- documentaries borne from the massive success of 1962’s Mondo Cane. These pictures do have a...
- 2/19/2019
- by Glenn Erickson
- Trailers from Hell
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