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Jade (Jade Risser), a girl in her early teens, really has no good
feelings about the new boyfriend (Sven Garrett) of her much older sister
Charlotte (Valerie Baber), a German photographer, and when she finds a
framed photograph of Hitler in his apartment - well, that doesn't make
things better. Jade has every reason to be concerned, too, because Mr
photographer is also an extremely sadistic rapist/torturer/murderer who
has his basement full of chained up naked women, corpses, torture
instruments and whatnot. Basically, his M.O. is this: He picks up
beautiful girls in the street, lures them back to his studio and persuades
them to do lingerie or erotic shots, sometimes seduces them, but always
either slashes their throats or knocks them out to chain them up in his
basement for later fun and games. For some reason though, he has never
hurt Charlotte - and he seems to stalk Jade, something Charlotte will hear
nothing of when Jade tells her. Why does the photographer do it? Because
he's a Nazi? Because his mother was a prostitute who killed herself?
Because of 9/11? We'll never know ... When Jade's best friend Megan
(Katie Richards) goes missing, that's too much for Jade, because she just
knows it was the photographer. So she somehow gets her hands on his
apartment key, breaks into his apartment ... and catches him red-handed
when he chainsaws a girl in two - not so good, because that means he's
armed with a chainsaw. However, Jade really clings to life, so she uses
every piece of weapon she can find, everything she has learned in her
not-too-distant hide-and-seek days, and every dirty trick in the book to
defend herself, and ultimately she can defeat and kill the photographer,
if only just ... It's only when she recovers from the ordeal that she
remembers that the photographer was actually after her when he picked up
her sister (on a bus), which he only did after Jade playfully flirted with
him ... ouch! By and large, Murder-Set-Pieces is either
celebrated or dismissed for its excessive gore, and only very few people
even try to look beyond that and at the actual film at hand rather than
only the scenes with the red stuff. Basically, yes, the gore is excessive
at times, and at least in part gratuitous, I'm not denying that - but the
scenes are certainly not the most gruesome ever, there have certainly been
better and more gruesome effects. What people overlook though is that
these scenes (as the film at large) are pretty well-filmed, they have a
certain aesthetic and atmosphere to them often amiss in other gore flicks.
Plus, director Palumbo most certainly knows how to create suspense and
tension, especially in completely gore-less scenes. And in
too-young-for-this-kind-of-film Jade Risser he has most certainly found a
talented young leading lady (unfortunately she has been in next to nothing
since). But that said, Murder-Set-Pieces is by no means great:
Its story structure is disappointingly muddled, narrative threads are
dropped and picked up at will, the murder scenes, as well-made as they
might be, get repetitive to the point of dullness after a while, and the
film fails miserably in giving its killer an actual motive but presents
the audience with a few hastily patched together psychological clichées. Anyways,
not great and you might have to have the stomach for it, but worth a look
at least.
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