Pieces (1982) - Juan Piquer Simón

"You don't have to go to Texas for a Chainsaw Massacre!" Co-written by the late great Joe D'amato, author of such hits as 1980's Black Orgasm and '79's Pleasure Shop on 7th Avenue, and not to mention the director of the infamous Porno Holocaust, Pieces is predictably trashy. But oh, 'tis a veritable Rembrandt of trash!

Pieces opens in 1942 (or rather, an alternate 1942 reality in which Boston is located in Spain, and you can bitch about the Patriots over touch-tone phones) with an uptight mom walking in on her young son putting together a puzzle ... a filthy, dirty, naked lady puzzle! She understandably goes batshit crazy (slow-mo mirror-smashin' crazy) and starts tearing the kid's room apart in a blind filth search. The boy can only see this getting worse through puberty and does his mom the favour of axing her face in half. And that's just the intro!

Pieces is great because it throws one big horror film cliché out the window: instead of giving us a smart, innocent, likable heroine to survive through the chainsaw madness, we get Kendall, an all around dumbass and against-all-odds campus stud. He inexplicably goes from number one suspect to honourary police officer, and still finds time to nail every campus cutie who crosses his path. One of them even promises to try to contain her pleasure by offering to gag herself, (though truthfully we kinda want to do it for her). Kendall becomes the right-hand man of detective Christopher George, the go-to guy for campus history and information, and bodyguard of the pro-tennis-playing undercover policewoman who happens to be George's future wife IRL. But don't let our hatred for the casanova-cum-cop mislead you, gentle readers: by our troth, this film is near-flawless in its executions.

While Pieces is trash from beginning to end, its kills are among the best in the business. The film opens with axe murder, progresses through chainsaw dismemberments, and throws in various kills of opportunity and plenty of blood on tits (our favourite!). Though one college co-ed claims "the most beautiful thing in the world is smoking pot and fucking on a waterbed," stabbing an annoying journalist on one comes a close second. Perhaps most brilliantly, the film ends with a Frankenstein of decomposing lady parts who robs Kendall of his manhood. Yes.

The kills more than compensate for all the nonsense that falls between. And just when things start to drag, there's some hilarious racism in the form of a kung-fu professor (Daisy: "what was his thesis?") attacking the lady cop, who later delivers an oscar-winning cry of fear and frustration: "Bastard! Bastard! Bastard!"

No doubt you are wondering where you can find this horrortastic cinematic gem. Look no further than the screen before you: Pieces is available in its entirety on YouTube.

It Is Fine! EVERYTHING IS FINE (2007) - Crispin Hellion Glover

crispin glover is an extremely high-functioning insane person. what distinguishes him from those merely skinning dipping in the cross-contaminated gene pools of bleeding hearts and artists and hollywood eccentrics is a conceptual drive stuck deliberately in neutral. this is not to say his projects don't go anywhere; rather, their momentum and direction are neither guided nor overdetermined. concept is both the means and the ends, and the concepts are - in a word - fucked. we love crispin glover because he's the arch wizard of screwball. everything he produces is perfectly consistent within his own conceptual paradigm, and if nothing else, the worlds he creates make sane people really uncomfortable (we are, after all, speaking of the mind that brought us "clowny clown clown"). so where talent does what it can, genius does what it must, and crispin hellion glover is a rare genius indeed.

fortunately for us, madhattery loves company. instead of retreating into the intricacies of his own brains, glover seeks out other screwballs with whom to make movies ... screwballs like steven c stewart. steven c stewart was a man with talent, frustration, and severe cerebral palsy whose rapunzel fetish and deep-seated misogyny came to a head in the original script for it is fine! EVERYTHING IS FINE. under glover's production, direction, and proceeds from charlie's angels, stewart plays the satanic hero-villain in his own made-for-tv after-school-special pornographic horrorshow.

to say it is fine! EVERYTHING IS FINE is difficult to watch misrepresents not only the film, but also notions of both difficulty and watching. wheelchairs, murder, and necrophilia aside, the film challenges the gaze because it forces audiences with even the most indelicate of sensibilities to spend 74 minutes looking at that from which we are socialised to avert our eyes. watching actors engage with and respond normally to someone both physically and verbally inarticulate bothers us. the sexual expression of people with disabilities makes us laugh. and frankly, we don't know what to do with a retarded serial killer with a semi-flaccid penis who flops around atop hot, naked, dead girls. but when he runs over the neck of one with his wheelchair, we know we've got our money's worth.