Mega Movie Review #1 - Murder Set Pieces

Let me preface this review by saying how much I HATE the term "torture porn".  First of all, anyone who says this just comes off like a pretentious douchebag who thinks gory horror movies are beneath them.  What if we used this kind of terminology for other film genres?  Do we call Michael Bay movies "A'splosion-gasms"?  Wait...yeah, I do.  Bad example.  What if the Rocky movies were called "Hardcore Fisting".  I mean, there's enough of them to do the whole "Volume (Insert Number Here)" joke.  Better yet, imagine the epic fight between Bruce Lee and Chuck Norris in Way of the Dragon.  Now imagine if someone called it "Hot Bear On Twink Action".  I bet if someone did that, Chuck Norris would telepathically mind rape you while the ghost of Bruce Lee violates your soul with a One Inch Thrust.  But as bad as all of that is, a bigger reason why I hate "torture porn" is that there is actually torture porn out there!  And it's not cool!  And this is coming from someone who gets aroused at the drop of a hat...literally.  Don't look at me like that.  The hat was dressed like she wanted it.

With that said, if there's any movie that can be considered "torture porn", it's Murder Set Pieces.

(Warning: What follows is not only a full recap of a disturbing movie...but my questionable "Photoshop" skills do come into play.  So not only will this review offend your morals, it might offend your eyes as well.  Reader discretion is advised.)

Filmed in 2004 by director Nick Palumbo (no relation to neither Chuck nor Daryl), Murder Set Pieces took the horror world by storm as it made the rounds in the festival circuit due to its super graphic and gory imagery and violence.  In fact, a story (whether true or not) has director William Lustig saying that the movie "went too far", which is saying a lot considering the man directed Maniac, one of the most disturbing and unsettling films in my opinion.  As it was released abroad in the following years, the film was banned in the UK, Ireland and Norway.  But when it was officially released on DVD by Lions Gate here in the US, a whopping 23 minutes of film had to be cut out to avoid getting an NC-17 rating, making it the first (and so far only) movie to have that much footage cut.  Honestly, I was stunned that the movie was even released let alone sitting on a Blockbuster Video shelf when I found it so I didn't even think about all of the editing done when I bought it.  Of course, there are copies of the uncut version floating around there on the Net so if you're interested but they're out of print and therefore pretty rare and expensive.  (But you can get one here at Diabolik Video because, hey, maybe they'll appreciate the link and then they can sponsor me and I can do this whole "reviewing random obscure movies" thing on the cheap, right?)

But whether it's rated R or not rated at all, no matter what way you "slice" it (OMG!  Get it?  It's a movie about murdering people with sharp objects and...No?  I lost you?), it's just not that good of a movie.  I don't think even the immense shock factor of the violence and gore can salvage it from being a boring, poorly acted, overindulgent mess...and not even the good kind either.  Why?  Well, the name should've given it away.  Murder SET PIECES.  It's not a movie, it's just a collection of scenes of people dying, with a half-assed plot tying it together...kinda.  I know complaining about this sort of thing is kinda hypocritical coming from me, a guy who replied to a friend's complaint that The Protector didn't have a good plot with "It's a movie with Tony Jaa finding his baby elephant by breaking limbs.  What plot do you need?"

Well, something a little more than THIS would help:

The movie starts off with an old school camera flash (which was totally not taken from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, among with a few other things you'll find out later on) revealing a mangled female body and a naked man covered in blood reciting something in German before the title card.  But then we switch to a shot of two girls running as one of them asks the other one if her sister's boyfriend that's picking them up from school is cool.  She doesn't seem to think so and you'll see why.

Rickety van with free candy: Old and Busted.  Badass muscle car with free candy: New Hotness.

After admonishing them for being late and dropping the one girl off, The Photographer (yes, that's what he's credited as) talks with the other one (named Jade) with some awkward smalltalk about school before getting into some more awkward talk about why he takes pictures, spouting some existential BS about how pictures capture life and will remain after you die.  Then he says that he wants to take Jade's picture.  Yup, this guy totally isn't our killer.  So he drops Jade off at the hair salon that her sister (and his girlfriend) Charlotte works at.  Despite her co-workers and clients swooning over the fact that she's dating a German fashion photographer, he shows little to no emotion and actually stares at Jade as Charlotte hugs him.

 

Creeper.

At this moment, I gotta do a sidebar and talke about The Photographer for a second.  Sure, he might look cool and menacing at all but to me, he looks like a cross between Wolverine and film director James Gunn (director of Slither and writer of numerous Troma movies, the Dawn of the Dead remake and...Scooby-Doo 1 and 2?)  Seriously, I can't get over the fact that our serial killer looks like the judge from VH1's Scream Queens on a Creatine bender.  (PS - Keep an eye out for Gunn's next film, Super, coming out later this year.)

 

Trust me, I've done worse with MSPaint...today.

So anyway, after lifting some weights, The Photographer goes to "shoot some girls" as he promised.  And by "shooting girls", he means "killing hookers".  And here's where the whole "torture porn" comes in as the scene is just a neon-lit shot of the two hookers making out to a throbbing techno beat until he joins in for a bit before killing them, stabbing one and choking the other to death.

And here we go with our first of many Stupid Dream Sequences.  These things will pop up throughout the movie, usually having a kid (who's totally NOT The Photographer) doing something, usually around train tracks to a Tubular Bells ripoff.

LOL, this one looks like the kid's gonna throw up.

With that out of the way, we have Charlotte and Jade in the car, with Jade talking about how much he doesn't like The Photographer, claiming that all he does is "take stupid pictures" and "looks at me funny".  Right there should be a telltale sign but Charlotte writes it off as a case of prepubescent xenophobia.  Ok, she says it's because "he's not from around here" but still.  But then Jade talks about how he ignores Charlotte and doesn't care about her, which should really be obvious to anyone watching this but Charlotte is blinded by love/lust/whatever.  I have to point out, despite being the voice of reason, the girl playing Jade is a HORRIBLE actress.  Even though she's actually a preteen girl, I have a hard time believing it and think she may be a robot who's speech program skips every once in a while.  But hey, she's better than either incarnation of Anakin Skywalker, am I right?  The sisters arrive to their destination, The Photographer's house for a dinner date.  Why Charlotte would bring her little sister along to a date other than not being able to afford a babysitter is beyond me.  The whole ordeal is awkward but is made even moreso when Jade points out the amount of blood on The Photographer's steak.  Seriously, look at it, did he even cook it?  At least throw it in the microwave for 5 seconds or run it under a Bic lighter for Christ's sakes!

The result of a new corporate partnership between Omaha Steaks and Sherwin-Williams.

So The Photographer replies with this:  "Blood contains iron, and you need iron to reproduce new blood cells.  See, that's the problem with women.  Women have an iron deficiency...among other things.  Women need more iron than men.  It's ironic.  Women suck blood out of men every day.  But at the end of every month, it leaks out.  It's just punishment."  OK, why the hell would you tell a little girl this?!?  And what does her sister do?  She giggles!  But hey, at least he makes a save by finishing his disturbing speech by asking if they want ice cream and her sister thinks it's a great idea.

World's Greatest Sister-Mom   

Obviously perturbed, Jade excuses herself to the restroom, only to do some investigative snooping in The Photographer's room.  And what does she find?

 

"You never told me you met Charlie Chaplin!"

Yup, she finds this picture of Hitler with a few Nazis and when The Photographer catches her, he reveals that one of them is his grandfather, saying that he was a "hero who fought the bad guys".  Jade reminds him that his grandfather was German.  OOOH SICK BURN!  But seriously, the guy is already a douchebag who kills people.  Does he really have to be a NAZI on top of it?  But I guess if professional wrestling has taught me anything, it's that foreign = evil.  After that, The Photographer has some bad dreams involving him running in the middle of the desert with blood flowing out of his mouth so he remedies that by walking around Vegas until finding a bored woman playing the slots.  The Photographer picks her up with his 1337 5107 h4XX0r1NG 5K177S which then results in her modeling for him.  His murderous rages start to kick in (signaled with a nosebleed) and we soon go into his inner sanctum of death, showing off blood splattered walls, decomposing bodies and instruments of torture such as...dentures embedded with nails and screws?

 

Pictured: Not Leatherface...you know, the one in Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation starring Matthew McConaughey (please don't ask me to review THAT one, I just might!)

The Photographer lifts more weights after supposedly doing the deed (off-screen so who knows if we actually get to see it in the unrated version) and we get Stupid Dream Sequence #2, this time with a hot woman flirting with Lil' The Photographer.  The next day, Jade and her friend are walking around while The Photographer is taking pictures of them from his car.  Jade's friend thinks he's cute but Jade thinks he's still creepy, especially after overhearing her sister complain that "he won't even fuck her".  And no, I'm not trying to be vulgar here, she actually says that!  I really did not want to hear that coming from a preteen girl.  People are complaining about Hit-Girl from Kick-Ass for being too vulgar but this is more vulgar than all of her curse words COMBINED!  With Hit-Girl, she just calls people "big stupid doo-doo heads", only with obviously harsher language but at least she doesn't know Big Daddy's sexual habits!  But wait, it gets better.  When Jade tells her friend that he's a Nazi "you know, like in World War II?", her friend just shrugs.  Hooray for public schools!  And according to Jade, Charlotte thinks she's just "exaggerating".  Yes, because you can totally exaggerate looking at a picture of Hitler.  I mean, if Jade told her sister that she saw a picture in 3-D of The Photographer's grandpa sliding down a rainbow with Mega-Hitler then yeah, THAT's exaggerating.

So The Photographer calls a hooker to a hotel room and kills her by slitting her throat in the bathtub and spouting off some more angry German.  NEXT!

Afterwards, The Photographer visits his good buddy Nazi Mechanic (not his birth name, I'd assume), played by Gunnar Hansen.  And much like our Stupid Dream Sequences, here we have our first of many Useless Cameos!  For those who don't know, Hansen played Leatherface in the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre.  But his appearance is useless as the scene goes like this: The Photographer talks to Nazi Mechanic a bit, Photographer has a mini-freak-out-dream on the couch with him covered in blood and a murdered girl laying out in the desert, Nazi Mechanic sells Photographer a gun, unsuccessfully pimps his daughter to The Photographer and that's it.  Never to be seen again.

 

"Seriously, just give me the damn money.  That'll be one less horror convention I'll have to suffer through."

Afterwards, The Photographer goes to a strip club and picks up a stripper to bone.  I'm not 100% sure if he kills her or if it's edited out or what but he has a nosebleed afterwards and makes a menacing speech about the world going up in flames or something to no one in particular while waving around a knife.  Since that's going nowhere, we go back to Jade and her friend at the playground, talking about Charlotte's problems with The Photographer.  It's pretty much exactly the same crap as before, saying that they don't do anything together and that The Photographer doesn't love her.  So they're making Charlotte out to be the dumbest women ever.  And considering that all the murders thus far have happened to women we're not even halfway through the damn movie, this is already the most misogynistic piece of crap ever put to celluloid.  And to really hammer that point home, The Photographer picks up a random woman and tosses her head out of his car window later that night.

What does everybody want?  A DIFFERENT MOVIE!

Yay!  Stupid Dream Sequence #3!  This time it's Lil' The Photographer ripping the dress off of a doll with a toy while surrounded by crayon drawings of people dying.  I wonder how many red crayons he went through.  After taking pics of a couple of porn stars (whom he surprisingly doesn't murder...unless that's been cut out), The Photographer goes to a porn shop where he encounters Useless Cameo #2!  This time it's Tony Todd, who's been in his fair share of horror movies but is known mostly for the Candyman series.  He plays the clerk at the porn shop and tries to act like a stereotypical cool black guy but comes off sounding like a half-assed Samuel L. Jackson impersonator.  Though I don't really blame Tony Todd himself, it's not like he had much to work with.

"Buy something, will ya?"

The Photographer wants a snuff film called "The Nutbag" which I don't even wanna know what happens in that one!  The clerk gets offended at his request since they don't carry that kind of thing and goes off on The Photographer.  Unfortunately, he's about to feel the end of The Photographer's shaving razor but fortunately a few robbers burst in (with semi-automatics, no less!).  A security guard bursts in and shoots one but gets shot himself, one of them makes the clerk empty the register and one of them starts shooting people for no reason.  So The Photographer slices the trigger-happy one across the face with his razor and shoots the other one, apparently saving the day.  The clerk thanks him but gets shot as well and The Photographer walks out, leaving one remaining survivor, a cute goth chick.  While I'm actually pretty glad that he didn't take the opportunity to kill another random woman for no reason, you'd think he would've at least disposed of her so that she wouldn't go to the cops.  Ugh, this whole movie doesn't make sense so why am I even trying to bother?

After a useless montage where nothing happens, Charlotte unsuccessfully tries to call The Photographer at the hair salon.  The other stylist reveals that it's now been OVER A MONTH since they've gone out and says he's not worth it, to which Charlotte tearfully replies "How do you know?"  Well, besides the fact that he obviously doesn't want to talk to you FOR A MONTH, pays more attention to your little sister and spends most of his free time murdering hookers, I guess I don't know, now do I?  I really don't want to play into the film's misogyny but seriously, anyone that willfully stupid kinda deserves to die.

Stupid Dream Sequence #4!  Once again, random woman flirts with Lil' The Photographer on the railroad tracks

"I don't care if I am 7, I'd still hit it."

Somehow The Photographer gets a hold of his precious snuff film, which involves some guy in a pig mask tied to a bed.  And after one of many drives down the Vegas Strip (while these sequences do look pretty good due to him driving a badass car around flashy signs, I've neglected to mention them as we've had scenes like this about five times by now and they all serve no purpose other than having the director say "Hey, I bought nice film stock!"), The Photographer goes back to his dungeon where he plays with a Jack In The Box made out of a skull and when the weasel goes pop...it's a little toy version of him, sideburns and all.  Wait, what?  Between killing hookers and killing more hookers, where the hell did he get the time to whittle his own visage into a jack in the box?

"Welcome to Jack In The Box.  Would you like to try our new Murder Meal?"

Oh, and he's also torturing a few girls.  Plus he looks inside his icebox (yet another Texas Chainsaw Massacre homage/ripoff) and says that it's "time to fill up".  Huh?  What would he need an icebox full of blood for?  And by the looks of it, there's already like 10 gallons of blood in there.  Isn't that enough?  Above his "workbench" is a blood-smeared collage of pics of himself flexing and above that is a plaster casting of his head.  Vain, much?  Then he takes out a Nazi war medal, holds it up to one of the girls and starts spouting more German, as if he's trying to ward off evil spirits or something.  Soon enough, he puts in his dentures of death and uses them on one of the girls.  But right after, he's getting one of those freak-out-nosebleed-murder-dreams so it's obvious that his bloodlust still isn't enough.

Nope, still don't care.

Seemingly wanting some help, The Photographer goes to a random bric-a-brac store owned by a hippie.  Oh wait, she's a tarot card reader.  Same difference.  In a kinda-sorta-funny moment, when the reader tells him to choose ten cards, so he just picks ten cards in a row.  The cards tell him that his mom was emotionally manipulative and that he has a hard time getting along with people (well, duh).  But when the cards tell her too much and she tells him to leave, he chokes her out and gets a nosebleed.  So...I guess that didn't help much.

Soon enough, he drives off to a house where a woman answers the door, telling him that he's late and that she sent the babysitter home an hour ago.  Wait a minute, what the hell is going on?  Is this...does he...have a wife?  What the fuck?  She argues with him in German as he nonchalantly gnaws on a chicken drumstick, but his attitude causes him to get slapped repeatedly.  In between German shouting fits, The Photographer tells her she "got what she wanted", "I never promised anything" and "Time to move on" but this explains nothing.  Well, what I want is a damn explanation as to why the hell this guy has a wife and why we don't even know about it until an hour into the movie and I won't move on until I get it!  The first time I watch this movie, this was the point where I just threw up my hands and said "Fuck it!"  I can deal with simple plots, bad acting and gratuitous bloodshed and nudity.  What I can't deal with is random things thrown into the plot for no reason.  Who is she in the first place?  Why are they married?  And why the hell is she mad at him for being an hour late tonight when he presumably hasn't even been here at all due to spending all his time photographing models, dating dumb women, killing hookers, ogling children and buying porn?  I might make an exception (and that's a biiiiiiig MIGHT) if this had some sort of bullshit existential meaning behind it all but I don't think it does.  It's just a random scene thrown into the movie for no reason.

Oh yeah, spoiler alert.  He kills his "wife" as a baby cries in the background.  Big shocker.

As a great man once said, "At least I got chicken."

The next day, The Photographer has another freak-out dream, this time featuring September 11th footage, resulting in yet another nosebleed.  And here we go from one thing to another.  Until this point, his violent-nosebleed dreams usually involve himself and women that he's killed or will kill or want to kill.  And now he's thinking about 9/11 and getting the same result, despite not being involved.  I would make an argument to say that killing people himself isn't satiating his bloodlust enough and now he must go on a wider scale...but then I'd be putting more thought into the movie than the director did.  It's obvious that he put this footage in here just to up the shock factor and is nothing more than a desperate cry for attention.  "Ooooh, look at me.  I'm putting footage of the biggest human tragedy in recent history in my movie because I'm so edgy and cool.  But don't get me wrong, this totally means something."  No it fucking doesn't.

I'd say that going back to Jade's (sub-)plot would be a welcome return but this plot is so useless that I don't give a damn anymore.  This time  Jade and her friend are talking about what they're going to dress up as for a Halloween party but Jade doesn't want to go because Charlotte is too upset that The Photographer wants nothing to do with her.  Jade then sees The Photographer watching them from his car.  She takes Sonic The Hedgehog's advice and tells a grown-up...unfortunately it's her dumbass sister-mom.  Of course, Charlotte doesn't believe her and yells at her, practically blaming her for their break-up or whatever the hell it is.  After that, we get Stupid Dream Sequence #5 but it's brief, just showing the hot chick on the railroad tracks then disappearing, followed by The Photographer walking around watching kids trick or treating while children's voices in his head tell him to kill them.

And in an impressive display of ripoffdom (yeah, I made that word up but it still makes more sense than half of this movie), The Photographer does push-ups while Hitler speeches play on his TV.  So not only is this movie now ripping off American Psycho, they're ripping off a scene where the main character in that movie does practically the same thing, only watching The Texas Chainsaw Massacre instead.  You see, even when the director rips off something else, he's STILL ripping off something Texas Chainsaw Massacre-related!  I don't know whether to hang my head in disappointment or congratulate the director for this brilliant display of subversive ripoffdom.

"I haff to return ze videotapes.  Mach schnell!"

Back to our (sub-)plot, Charlotte is watching a news report on TV about Jade's friend Megan going missing, having last been seen trick or treating.  I hate to say this, considering the circumstances, but it's about damn time SOMETHING important happened regarding these characters!  Charlotte asks Jade where Megan is since she saw her last and Jade says she's dead.  But before she can complete the most obvious explanation ever, Charlotte gets a phone call.  Guess who it is?  And guess who's dumb enough to fall for it?  Knowing at this point that her sister has the mental capacity of retarded oatmeal, Jade sneaks around while Charlotte is on the phone and finds the key to The Photographer's place.  Cut to Charlotte and The Photographer boning.  Charlotte's glad that she finally got what she wanted but not for long as The Photographer just shoves her off so he can shave.  But lest we forget that he has a job to do, he picks up the naked doll from Stupid Dream Sequence #3 and creepily feels it up while reminding himself "I'm the bastard son of a goddamn whore."

...a bastard with damn sweet chops but a bastard nonetheless.

Meanwhile, Jade goes to a gas station and hops in a random car, hoping that the driver will take her to where she wants to go.  Yeah, you're worried about some creepy German taking pictures of you from his car that killed your best friend yet you're willing to go into some random stranger's car in hopes that he'll help you?  Smart kid.  And here we get Useless Cameo #3 in the form of Edwin Neal as the driver.  Neal, along with Gunnar Hansen, was also in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre as he played The Hitchhiker.  And wouldn't you know it, when he drops Jade off, he tells her never to hitchhike again.  OH MY GOD! HE TOTALLY REFERENCED THAT MOVIE HE WAS IN BY TELLING HER NOT TO TO WHAT HE DID IN THAT MOVIE!  YOU KNOW, THE MOVIE THAT'S BEEN REFERENCED ABOUT ELEVENTY-FIVE TIMES NOW!  ISN'T THAT HILARIOUS?

Oh I got it.  It just wasn't funny.

So now Jade is in The Photographer's house, snooping around with a kitchen knife for protection.  Meanwhile, in his dungeon, The Photographer is taking a chainsaw to some girl that's obviously NOT Charlotte.  Where did Charlotte go?  After getting pushed off of his dong, she just walked away naked.  Did she get her clothes and leave?  We never saw that.  Who is this new girl?  And how the hell did The Photographer have time to have sex with Charlotte, shave, brush his teeth AND kidnap a new girl in the time that Jade hitchhiked over here?  And WHY THE FUCK am I still using logic at this point?  After finding some woman's shoes alongside his shoes in the closet, Jade finds the trap door to the dungeon but gives herself away.

"LEAVE ME ALONE!  I'M EATING STEAK IN HERE!"

Jade runs away from The Photographer and instead of running out of the house, she makes like Macauley Culkin and hides underneath the bed.  This outsmarts him somehow as he leaves the room and then flips the bed AFTER she has run out.  But again, instead of running out of the house, she runs...into the dungeon?  WHY?  I'd imagine she'd want to save her sister but you're running from a blood-covered maniac.  I don't imagine there'd be much left to save, kid.  After seeing all the corpses and blood covering the basement, she hides in a closet, where there's more corpses and blood.  Somehow, she's smart enough to kick the door into his face just as he's about to open it but it only delays the inevitable as The Photographer soon grabs Jade and sits her on his workbench...next to a conveniently placed pair of scissors.  So Jade stabs him in the gut with them and follows it up by hitting him in the face with the wooden plank holding the cellar door shut.  And...that's it?  I mean, I know this is supposed to be rooted in the real world so I'd imagine a pair of scissors to the gut would do more damage.  But come on, I grew up with guys like Freddy and Jason and Michael.  Guys who would get stabbed and not do a thing.  Guys who would supposedly die multiple times in one movie, let alone several.  And even then, The Photographer has enough in him to pull the scissors out but somehow getting hit in the face with a wooden plank by a preteen girl is enough to put him down for the count?  Come on!

"Hey, that kinda-sorta hurts!"  Dude, you're a villain in a horror movie.  Man up.

So Jade escapes soaked in blood and without Charlotte, who may or may not be dead.  She could've very well been in the cellar but she was probably too covered with fake blood to be recognizable.  We didn't see her die but that part could've very well been cut out for the Rated R release.  But who really cares at this point?  I sure as hell don't.  Oh, and we get our sixth and final Stupid Dream Sequence where Lil' The Photographer finds the hot chick (his mom, maybe?) dead and topless underneath the railroad tracks.  And we get our closure...I guess.

Goddamn stupid closure.  And boobs.

And since horror movie villains never truly die (and especially since he didn't really suffer any mortal wounds), we find The Photographer on a bus to Los Angeles where he meets Useless Cameo #4, hottie Cerina Vincent.  As per every hot chick on a bus to LA, she wants to be an actress and he takes her picture.  Of course, I'm not listening to a word of this because she's not naked.  Seriously, putting Cerina Vincent in a movie and not having her be naked is like putting Chuck Norris in a movie and not having him kick people or putting Owen Wilson in a movie and having him act.  It's just what she does.  Out of all the women you had naked in your movie, you don't pick the one who spent an entire movie naked?  Now THAT's wrong!

Even though this is from a completely different movie, I'm just gonna pretend this is how it really ended.

Fin.

Before I wrap up this review with my final thoughts, let's see what the critics had to say...at least the ones credited on the DVD cover as I'm so done with this movie that I don't wanna look it up on the Internet anymore than I have to.  Plastered on the front of the cover right next to the carved-up female mannequin, Hustler Magazine called it "...the most graphic horror film ever committed to celluloid."  I'm not exactly sure if Hustler is any sort of cinematic authority but hey, if Playboy can get away with having thoughtfully written articles inbetween airbrushed pictures of models, then I guess Hustler can review crappy movies inbetween close-up pictures of various orifices.  One notable review bit said "Murder-Set-Pieces is a sick, repellent and ultimately offensive movie."  This one is pretty accurate but considering this is coming from Fangoria Magazine, they could have very well meant that as a compliment instead of an insult.  But the one that really gets my goat is this one from Rue Morgue Magazine: "(Nick) Palumbo displays flashes of visual brilliance reminiscent of the best works of Dario Argento."  Umm...no he fucking doesn't.  Though I love horror movies, I don't consider myself an aficionado by any means and have only seen a handful of Dario Argento films (namely the classics Suspiria and Opera).  But literally the only thing vaguely Argento-nian about Murder Set Pieces is the fact that Palumbo included songs from the band Zombi, who play atmospheric late '70s-early '80s synth-prog in the same vein of Italian horror soundtrack mainstays Goblin.  But that's pretty much it.  Other than that, I can't think of anything that Dario Argento would be proud of.

Now what do I ultimately think about it?  First, I'll be nice and get into the good parts.  Yes, even though I just spent a good 4-5 hours over the course of a couple days writing this article ripping on the movie, there are a few positives.  First, for a movie filmed on a presumably small budget, this movie looks good.  And I mean, damn good.  Whenever The Photographer drives down the glitzy Vegas Strip in his badass car, it looks good enough to make you stop wondering why so many of those shots would be in this movie in the first place.  And whenever you peek into his dungeon, the blood soaking the walls is such a bright red hue that it almost looks like a painting.  Also, though I wouldn't call him a great horror movie villain or monster or anything like that, the actor who plays The Photographer (Sven Garrett) has enough of a presence to carry a film like this.  Even though I give Sven some flack for looking like a certain scrawny director, there is something about him when he starts spouting off German.  In fact, I would have liked for the German to be subtitled but I'm sure it would've taken away from the whole "fly-on-the-wall" mentality of shooting.  Now, if only he were given some better material to work with.  In fact, I guess that could be said for all of those involved.  Though I've seen plenty of better child actors than the girl who played Jade (Jade Risser), I've certainly seen a lot worse as well.  For an independent horror feature where finding decent adult actors is bad enough, let alone children, they probably did the best they could.  It's just that the material made her look awkward as hell.  And if Charlotte weren't written as a worse female stereotype than the entire cast of Sex and the City and every variation of Barbie combined, I'm sure the actress playing her (Valerie Baber) would have done a better job.

Now, for the bad...

First of all, like I said at the onset, this isn't a movie.  It's just a collection of death scenes with a crappy plot barely tying it together.  There could have been one of two options to pull this off.  One, don't have the killer bump off all these random hookers and give the relationship between Jade, Charlotte and The Photographer more meaning.  Or two, and I feel this would have been the best option for what Nick Palumbo wanted to achieve (being shock factor and nothing more), cut out the plot altogether and follow around The Photographer on his sadistic quest like some modernized hyper-violent over-stylized version of Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer.  It would have supplied the shock value and it would have supplied the violence for the gorehounds.  What it probably wouldn't have done was find a release as no one would want to pick up a movie THAT violent and even if they did, it would be edited all to hell.  Even though the DVD release has it's fair share of gore, all the killings are either edited out or implied off-screen.

Secondly, stop trying to compare your movie to other much better movies, because you'll automatically fail.  Murder Set Pieces DESPERATELY wants to be this generation's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.  From the flash bulbs of The Photographer's camera to the bored cameos and other various winks and nods, it plays itself up like it wants to be the natural successor and fails horribly.  Whenever you consider yourself "The Next" of something, everyone's going to hold you up to such a high standard set by the original.  That's why remakes fail and that's one of the big reasons why Murder Set Pieces fails.  It wants to be some sort of hybrid between The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and American Psycho with 100x the gore and 0x the social impact and relevance.

Murder Set Pieces isn't offensive because it's a shocking and deviant movie about a guy who murders hookers in his basement and has deeply embedded psychological issues.  Murder Set Pieces is offensive because it tries way too hard to be offensive.  This movie is like the kid on the playground who wants to get noticed, so he does progressively dumber and grosser things to get attention.  One day he's kissing the smelly girl in class.  The next day he's eating worms.  The next day he gets depantsed on the monkey bars.  The day after that, he craps himself.  And so on and so forth.  Maybe a few of the other kids will point and laugh.  But most of them will think he's dumb and not worth being around.  I mean, would you want to hang around a kid that eats worms and craps himself?  And would you admit to watching this movie in public?  Well, I guess I kinda did.  Forgive me for playing psychologist (Lord knows I need one myself with all the crap I've seen) but Murder Set Pieces seems like a screaming cry for help.  I don't want to come out and call Nick Palumbo a misogynist psychopath with severe mommy issues.  For all I know, he could be a decent guy.  But when you write AND direct something like this, it's kinda hard not to think that.

Worse yet, I'm sure Palumbo is going to try, if he hasn't already, to write off this movie as an artistic accomplishment and try to give it meaning, despite being as shallow as a kiddie pool, yet full of more unwanted fluids.  A case could be made for the movie being artistic between the Stupid Dream Sequences, The Photographer's untranslated rants in German and The Photographer's tendencies to wax philosophic to some of his victims, all of which add to a surreal experience.  But the fact is none of that serves any purpose, except maybe to shock and offend but compared to everything else in the movie it doesn't even do that.  Much like the "artist" (and I use that term loosely) who painted a portrait of the Virgin Mary with feces.  Using "art" as a fall-back excuse for your twisted visions doesn't let you off the hook, it just cheapens the notion of art as a whole.  So seeing stuff like this proclaimed as "art" makes me want to go rob a bank, beat up the homeless, kick defenseless puppies, poison a reservoir and set fire to a nursing home.  But don't worry...I'm doing it in the name of art!  So it's all good, right?

With all of that said, I think that if he produced some better material, kept his ego in check a bit more and didn't rely so much on pre-established concepts or pre-existing franchises, Nick Palumbo would have the potential to do something memorable.  But Murder Set Pieces is memorable for all the wrong reasons.  I'm sure that in his mind, he could very well believe that whatever future work he has coming down the pipeline (if any) will have trouble living up to Murder Set Pieces, when he honestly might want to think about living it down.