A young boy is caught by his mom working on a nudie jigsaw puzzle. She threatens to burn all the porn she finds in his room and asks him to get a trash bag; he returns with an ax and chops her to pieces, digging out a saw for those extra-pesky bones. Then he returns to his puzzle.

And so begins Spanish auteur Juan Piquer Simón’s Pieces, an unintentionally hilarious slasher that manages to make even its excessive gore scenes exceedingly comical.

Forty years later, things are pretty idyllic at the college campus, where the students demonstrate their higher education through such lines as, “The most beautiful thing in the world is smoking pot and fucking on the waterbed at the same time!” One fine morning, a girl skateboards through a plate glass window — a bravura scene, sure, but it has nothing to do with the story, which has female college students who are quick to get naked for the camera start dying at the whirring blade of a yellow chainsaw.

Who’s the culprit? Is it the burly groundskeeper? The university’s anatomy professor? The mousy British dean? The killer is mostly cloaked in shadows or shot from the ankles down, yet the gore is indeed gory, with limbs and noggins lopped off before your very eyes. One girl pisses herself before her torso gets cut in two. Following each kill, the murderer retreats to adding more pieces of that nudie puzzle, working his way down from the top. (And here I was always taught to the do the borders first and work inward.)

It all leads up to the expected climax, wherein the killer is shot just in the nick of time, before he can kill the hero (Pod People’s Ian Sera, playing a college student who snares an unbelievable amount of chicks, despite looking like Screech from TV’s Saved by the Bell). But then something unexpected happens that had me rolling in hysterics. And then that’s followed up by a final shot that also was greeted with unbelievable laughter, even if it makes no sense. If only all those Friday the 13th sequels had been like this. —Rod Lott

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Which is the worst part of the complicated rights issue with the original 1968 Night of the Living Dead? Is it:
A. that director George A. Romero and company were screwed out of millions, or
B. that it allowed Jeff Broadstreet to make Night of the Living Dead 3D: Re-Animation?

With apologies to those good people’s bank accounts, the answer is B. Trust me on this one. You’d agree if you saw this abomination, but I encourage you to run in the other direction. The answer is totally B.

Even if writer/director/producer Broadstreet — who also helmed the 2006 Night of the Living Dead 3D “remake” — had left the classic film’s title off his own, the results still would remain abortive. Ladies and gentlemen, we have the 21st-century Ed Wood. The difference is that nobody will be watching Broadstreet’s work after he passes. Hell, they shouldn’t be watching it while he’s alive, either.

It took me four tries to start NOTLD3D:R-A before I could muster the strength to watch it all the way through. Andrew Divoff (Wishmaster) fronts the film as Gerald Tovar Jr., a second-generation mortician who doesn’t cremate the corpses he’s paid to; instead, he piles them into one dank dungeon of a room, which characters can enter and somehow not vomit from the stench. Guess what happens to the bodies. (Did you say “zombies”?)

I suppose NOTLD3D:R-A holds a curiosity factor among those wishing to see Divoff act alongside Re-Animator‘s Jeffrey Combs, who plays Gerald’s no-good, conspiracy-prone teabagger brother. To horror-con geeks, this sounds akin to Pacino and De Niro’s diner scene in Heat. It’s not; it’s the gum under the table at that diner. And I like both actors.

This chore of a watch is all about CGI blood and green-screen antics and, because of shooting in three dimensions, intrusive angles. The 3-D doesn’t even work, so why bother? On the disc’s production featurette, Broadstreet tells you why: Because he thinks he’s making a sociopolitical statement. He’s delusional; he’s made the A/V equivalent of a bowel movement. I hate to be so harsh, but this time, it’s merited. —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.