Pieces of Extreme '80s Horror; Paris Hilton Pitches Her Pipes in Repo! The Genetic Opera

The new Pieces DVD from Grindhouse Releasing is, as the movie famously proclaimed on its own poster, exactly what you think it is.

It’s Pieces, all right -- a one-of-kind sleaze-tacular thunderbolt of brutality and hysteria -- but, more than that, this DVD is Pieces done right.

First there is the movie itself, which is gorgeously restored, looking better on this two-disc set than it ever possibly could have in its previous history.

Then come the inventive and meticulously rendered bonus features: interviews with director Juan Piquer Simón and co-star Paul L. Smith, an alternate music score, trailers, galleries and, most impressively, a soundtrack recording of an audience reacting to a Pieces screening at Hollywood’s charmingly decrepit Vine Theater. There's even a collector's booklet by horror scribe extraordinaire Chas Balun.

Also be aware of a primo Easter Egg on disc one: a video documenting a Hollywood Boulevard showing of Pieces, which was hosted by big-time horror hot-shot Eli Roth.

No matter what one thinks of Roth’s own movies (I love Hostel, am indifferent to Hostel II, and absolutely despise Cabin Fever) and/or the hair-do and tracksuit apparently raided from Dane Cook’s stylist, Roth is indisputably the real-deal in at least one regard: he gets out there and supports the finest of arts. Here’s to him.

This entire Pieces package is the result of fanatics laboring for other fanatics (and themselves), tracking down key players in the production, and being sure to answer any questions that devotees have pondered for the past few decades.

Such above-the-call-of-capitalism dedication is business-as-usual for Grindhouse Releasing. This is the company, after all, that resurrected Lucio Fulci’s The Beyond (1981) for theatrical consumption a decade ago and has since issued eye-bulging definitive DVD editions of Cannibal Holocaust (1980), Cannibal Ferox a.k.a. Make Them Die Slowly (1984), and I Drink Your Blood (1970).

Not a Shemp in the bunch.

But what of Pieces itself, now, 25 years later?

There was, and remains, nothing else quite like it.

In description, Pieces’ plot sound like standard giallo business. The action opens in an anachronism-crammed 1942 New England bedroom, where a spindly tyke gets busted by his mother for putting together a naked-lady jigsaw puzzle. Junior then axes his mom into the drippy crimson elements of the title.

Forty years later, somebody’s chainsawing co-eds at a nearby university and making off with hunks of their bodies. You got it: pieces.

An (unlit) cigar-chomping cop, an undercover tennis pro, and a Jimmy-Olsen-like college joe team up to nab the mangler.

Top suspects include the ghoulish Dean and a Bluto-like groundskeeper (played by the actual Bluto from Robert Altman’s Popeye).

Indeed, pieces gorily pile-up and there’s a post-climax pay-off that, truly, no uninformed first-time viewer can possibly see coming … and which they then can never un-see after it comes so hard.

Now consider that Pieces made an indelible impact in light of its debuting in the midst of Splattermania, when screens ran red anew each weekend with a fresh influx of taboo-shattering slasher bashes.

Splatter titles competed with Pieces that were grosser (the aforementioned Cannibal abominations), wittier (Bloodsucking Freaks), more sadistic (Mother’s Day), more legitimately insane (Romano Scavolini’s Nightmare) and more the inevitable by-product of crackpot visionaries (Maniac, Sleepaway Camp).

And, still, Pieces stands out.

What Pieces does uniquely boast is its own inexplicably credible, utterly incredible logic. Even as the most off-the-wall transgressions take place, we unquestioningly follow right along – amused, maybe, but never feeling like the next ludicrous episode seems out of place (e.g. – the famous tennis player, the surprise karate expert, the abrupt end to any mystery regarding the killer’s identity, and the way-out-of-nowhere careen into the supernatural).

Pieces’ violence also ranks among the most inventive in all of horror. Each incident is not only creative in execution (pun intended), they are additionally all tinged with palpably damaged sexuality that reaches deep into desperately dire places.

Consider how we’d all like to peep down from a treetop at a nearby sunbathing college chick. Then consider how, in Pieces, when one such peeped-upon chick gives guff to a branch-trimming peeper, he grabs his dick-shaped reducing machine and, with one smooth swoop, promptly detaches her head from her spine.

Peeping accomplished. Larger issue abated. For that one moment.

Vengeance for erotic rejection and thwarted orgasms fuels Pieces from its opening, where matricide committed over novelty smut plays out on screen as the realization of inexpressible thoughts that occur to any reasonable youngster with an disrespected erection.

A few years later, fake black people The Beastie Boys fake-rapped about this real bummer incurred when “your mom threw away your best porno mag.” You tell me if Pieces doesn’t nail (to employ a hardware-related verb) this frustration more accurately.

The first dozen-or-so times I watched Pieces, though, the money shot occurred (over and over again) about an hour in, when Spanish siren Leticia Marfil flees from the murderer while she’s clad only in tight white sweat pants.

Then, just before Leticia succumbs (in half) to the chainsaw, the camera closes in on her crotch and she pisses herself.

Oh, what a sight. Oh, what a feeling.

At 14, I marveled at Leticia’s hissing expulsion, not merely because of the inherent sexiness of the golden gush (if you are an attractive female and I’ve been near a bathroom that you were using, I have eavesdropped and enjoyed it), but because -- really -- any mope with a chainsaw can commit murder.

But, through sheer force of implied might, to spontaneously empty the bladder belonging to your object of lust (blood or otherwise)?

Now you’re playing with power.

Pieces will still fit whatever you need it to.

***

Repo! The Genetic Opera (2007) aims to do for today’s agonized, ugly, and unloved adolescents what the grand (glandular) guignol of Pieces and its 42nd Street splatter ilk (along with Howard Stern and The Three Stooges and Hustler and, yes, The Rocky Horror Picture Show) did for me: supply simple succor to alleviate anti-human hatred while engendering inklings of potency and perhaps even human connection -- real or imagined or whatever combination thereof.

Thus, Repo automatically gets an A for Intention, with all other grades coming in on a generously sliding scale.

Set in a murky Every Dystopia in the year 2057, Repo chronicles lowlifes and big-shots in a world where elective surgery is humanity’s primary rush and GeneCo, the corporation that supplies the body parts, occasionally has to yank their products back for non-payment of services.

Grown-up Spy Kids kid Alexa Vega stars as a teenage recluse who may or may not be stricken with a rare malady, while her father (Anthony Head) cares for her by day and then, by night, dons leather and power-tools and acts as a Repo Man, re-harvesting unpaid for human organs (while they’re still in use).

Paul Sorvino supplies mucho brio as the head of GeneCo. His unworthy heirs are Chop Top from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part II, Ogre from Skinny Puppy, and Paris Hilton.

Entertainment in this dreary setting comes from Broadway icon Sarah Brightman as a blind, bewitching opera diva, while overseeing it all is Grave Robber (Terrance Zdunich), a very Hot Topic dude who pushes body fluids as narcotics.

So what’s good?

The art direction, costumes, sets, and comic-book transitions work, occasionally with brilliance. This is a niftily realized universe.

Sarah Brightman’s every moment ghoulishly enchants, from her world-class pipes to her mechanical eyes projecting holograms to her spectacularly sanguinary stage exit.

And Paris Hilton does rock.

What’s lame is Repo’s music, which proves problematic in a production where all the dialogue is belted out with such gusto. Plus, bald cap aside, stricken Goth heroine Alexa Vega is dull on arrival.

The single Repo nude scene, courtesy of masculine-monikered Jake Reardon, is okay, but curious: the character wails about her love of cosmetic alterations, then reveals a pair of perfectly lovely, implant-free breasts (shades of the naturally beautiful Gina Gershon’s “doggy-chow” pep-talk in Showgirls, wherein she claims to be the result of “a lot of paint and a good surgeon”).

In fact, much is curious about Repo! The Genetic Opera, and conclude what you will as to how this up-from-the-underground hit is a snapshot of the Contemporary Suffering Teen zeitgeist.

Repo contains not on scintilla of irony, self-awareness, or even the slightest outside perspective. This is uncut misery, isolation, and doom stuffed through a grandiosity-making machine and coming out pumped-up and on fire to hyper-real and, indeed, operatic proportions.

It’s a Midnight Movie in the classic sense, minus any classic Midnight Movie sense of camp. For whereas Rocky Horror mocks Brad and Janet while rooting for them, Repo plays more like a mortally earnest telling of The Story of Magenta.

Even the casting of La Hilton comes devoid of wit. Paris is electrifying sexy and effective in her part, to be sure, but she’s just there. In no way is her presence equivalent to John Waters aligning Liz Renay, Patty Hearst, or Traci Lords with his knowingly nutbar creations.

So the 21st century Jayne Mansfield has tiny tits and a tinier heinie -- which I’m not complaining about -- and nobody in Repo is in on the joke, because it’s no joke, because cracking a smile would collapse the entire concoction. And at my advanced age, I’m in no position to complain about that, either.

The teenage crowd in which I sat for a packed midnight Repo screening booed a trailer for Twilight, then went orgasmic for the Twisted Pictures logo, and stayed that way until the main feature’s final fadeout. They greeted each song opening with wild shrieks, and rapturously applauded each conclusion. At no juncture was the atmosphere less than thick-as-brick with glee.

Repo is a bona fide cult phenomenon, calculated or not.

At one point while I watched, the audience hysteria got so overpowering, I turned to my companion and instinctively whispered: “Jeez, it’s like the Bay City Rollers or something.”

Not long after, Alexa Vega hissed at her old man from the screen. “I’m 17! And at least that’s better then … FORTY!”

Point(s) taken. You little bitch.