Every morning I tentatively check Bleeding Skull in hopes of fresh insight into the shadow world of forgotten horror, and it's always exciting to see new titles up for investigation. This round offers Bits & Pieces, an obscure piece indeed that none other than me wrote up for All Movie Guide a handful of years ago. As usual, my pedantic style is no match for their exhuberance, but showing up first still counts for something, right?

Bits and Pieces

A pair of female college students visit a nightclub that features male strippers to take notes for a sociological term paper. After they say goodnight to each other in the parking lot, Tanya (Sheila Lussier) is abducted by a maniac who hauls her back to his basement. Arthur (S.E. Zygmont) is a madman who believes a bewigged mannequin speaks to him with his dead mother's voice, taunting him to kill. He secures Tanya to a workbench, paints garish rosy cheeks on her face with lipstick, then slowly tears her apart. Her dismembered body is found in a dumpster, and Lt. Carter (Brian Burt) recognizes the strange makeup job from other unsolved killings that he's been investigating. He interviews the girl who was out with Tanya the night she died, the distraught Rosie (Suzanna Smith), and despite an emotionally charged first impression, their mutual attraction blossoms into love. Unfortunately, the voice in Arthur's head is whispering that Rosie might be a dangerous witness against him, so he tracks her down on campus, torturing a classmate to learn her name and address. A romantic walk on the seashore for Carter and Rosie leads to lovemaking by his fireplace, while Arthur invades Rosie's home, silences her parents, and waits for her to return.

This routine slasher thriller offers familiar motivation for its villain's gruesome deeds; his mom was a slut who drank too much and sexually humiliated him as a child. Ho hum. Aside from a curious interest in male strippers (there's ample footage of scantily clothed beefcake), Bits and Pieces adds nothing new to a tired formula. The tone is suitably grim, however, and director Leland Thomas dodges a paltry special effects budget for his unsettling murder scenes by keeping the focus on the faces of the killer and victims. Spattered with blood and overcome with emotion, they provide an intensity that rubber prosthetics can never match. It doesn't change the fact that every woman in the film looks exactly the same (blonde, blue eyes, pretty, early twenties), making it hard to keep track of who is getting offed and when. As Arthur, S.E. Zygmont tries to channel Harry Dean Stanton's twitchy authenticity and fails, never nailing down whether psychosis or rage is the root of his character's violence. Also, Arthur seems to have an endless supply of white shirts and skinny black ties that he can just throw out and replace after getting soaked in gore. It certainly isn't his mom keeping up with the laundry, since Arthur apparently murdered her at some point before the narrative begins (frequent flashbacks and nightmare sequences fill us in on Arthur's troubled past). Hardcore slasher film fans should be satisfied with Bits and Pieces, though they'll feel like they've seen it all before. Thomas is not known to have directed another feature, though his lumbering image is captured forever in a brief cameo as the "Large Stranger," and he delivers the film's best line ("Watch where you're going, apple ass!"). FRED BELDIN