Going to Pieces with Friday Night Frights

The "Friday Night Frights" series at The Carousel Cinemas is garnering a cult following worthy of the films it showcases. This is especially true of the past week's film Pieces (1982), a Spanish-produced (but dubbed into English) masterpiece of visceral disorientation. How can a film not be considered seminal when it involves a chainsaw-wielding killer, a slow-motion waterbed death sequence and a kung-fu teacher fighting an aging tennis player? It's the sort of uncanny filmmaking that the patrons of the series have begun to expect and enjoy.

As usual, the evening begins with a costume contest: "Dress like a slasher victim." A couple of bloodied young women take the stage. The loudest roar from the crowd gets the winner a prize. Then, the vintage trailers begin. This go-around features Michele Saovi's Cemetery Man (1994), The Curse (1987) and Lady in White (1988). The grainy, washed- out film prints only add to the authentic grindhouse feel. Then, the feature attraction starts; a young boy, putting a pornographic puzzle together, is lambasted by his overprotective mother. Unable to withhold his rage, the boy takes an axe and chops her into…pieces. These horrifying events are met with overjoyed laughter by the crowd, who's happily appalled by the unorthodox subject matter and execution. Let the jokes, expletives and distastefulness fly.

Though the crowd at the screening certainly has their fill by roasting Pieces, one should not be so quick to discount a cinema which differs significantly from popular expectation. Certainly, conventional styles of acting, editing and coherent dialogue are not to be found. This, however, can be explained by the title of the film; indeed, what is cinema in the post-modern era, but "pieces" of previous films, cobbled together to make a new one? In this notion, a degree of self-awareness exists within the film, given that it is essentially a combination of Psycho (1960) and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) filtered through an Italian giallo kaleidoscope. The score evokes the Dario Argento work by The Goblins; given the presence of these influences, the word "knock-off" hardly qualifies. Pieces is doing something Quentin Tarantino only learned to articulate in his latest film Inglourious Basterds: cinema as a means to an end. Therefore, Pieces is literally a pastiche, a hodgepodge of cinematic history, in the slasher tradition.

Patrons of the "Friday Night Frights" series would be remiss if they asserted the films they love to deride are simply "bad." This is how cult cinema should function, though; as a subversive means of expression, detached from the mainstream. The series concludes at midnight this Friday, with a showing of Peter Jackson's Dead Alive.