When someone brings up John Carpenter the first film someone usually thinks of is either 'Halloween', 'The Thing', the Escape films, 'They Live', 'The Fog', or 'Big Trouble in Little China'. I usually think of one of my favorite horror films 'In the Mouth of Madness'. Hardly anyone brings up his film ‘Body Bags’. Many people haven’t even seen the film, which is a shame since it’s a fun film to watch. Body Bags is a TV horror anthology film directed by both John Carpenter and Tobe Hooper (Texas Chainsaw Massacre).
It was Showtime’s answer to HBO’s anthology series 'Tales from the Crypt'. Instead of the Crypt Keeper we get John Carpenter as the creepy coroner. Much like the Crypt Keeper he introduces each segment with one-liners and has a very cornball sense of macabre. Actually after the commercial and critical flop of Carpenter’s ‘Memoirs of an Invisible Man’ in 1992 he signed on with Showtime to produce a horror anthology series. During shooting Showtime got cold feet in making a commitment to a series. So what did they do? They recovered it and edited it into a TV movie called ‘Body Bags’.
It’s always hard to review an anthology film because you’re almost always going to get fluctuating quality between all the segments. Even one of the best anthology films like Creepshow has its weak parts. It’s not in the favor of ‘Body Bags’ that it falls in between being a TV series and a film. If it was a television series it would be slightly above average, but as a film it would be fairly cheap looking and slightly under average.
There are three segments in the film. Carpenter directed the first two segments: ‘The Gas Station’ and ‘Hair’. Tobe Hooper directed the final segment “The Eye”. The first segment is probably the most suspenseful. It’s about Anne on her first night of the job looking over an isolated 24-7 gas station in a rural area just outside of Haddonfield, Illinois (horror fans without a doubt will identify that Haddonfield is the home of Michael Myers from the Halloween series). Her departing co-worker warns her that there’s an escaped murderous satanic serial killer out on the loose in the area. This makes her even more distrustful as the night continues on. She encounters a lot of late night patrons, but she feels moderately safe until she unintentionally locks herself out of the booth. There’s a lot of intriguing cameos in this segment including Wes Craven (A Nightmare on Elm Street) and Sam Raimi (Evil Dead). Wes Craven played a pretty good stalker. Once the killer is discovered the tension is escalated. Carpenter really makes this simple story work with the unnervingly abandoned backdrop, the red herrings, and misdirection to keep the viewers attention.
The second segment is the quirkiest out of the three. It’s about an aging businessman who is fanatically self conscious about his receding hairline. He tries everything to find a cure for getting his hair back. He tries everything from those late night television advertisements promising that your hair will grow back to those ridiculous spray on hair items. Then he stumbles across an advertisement for a miracle cure for hair. So he goes to the specialist who promises him hair with his new experimental treatment. And just like that his hair grows overnight… a ridiculous amount of hair. What first seems like a success soon becomes deadly. It’s a very light-hearted and goofy segment.
The third and final segments is directed by Tobe Hooper and features Luke Skywalker himself. It’s about a Major League Baseball player who gets into a horrific car accident who loses his eye because of it. Once he awakens from a coma he realizes that he’s lost his eye. With his career being threatened he is offered a chance to get his sight back with a revolutionary new eye transplant, but with no promises that’ll work. However, it does work, but soon he’s overwhelmed with headaches and disturbing visions of assaulting and murdering young women. He’s forced to look into who the eye originally belonged to. It’s a pretty gruesome yet highly predictable segment. Some ghastly shock moments. There’s a nice little Roger Corman (Attack of the Crab Monsters/ House of Usher) cameo. I’m surprised that Mark Hamill agreed to do this segment since in 1977 Hamill crashed his car and had to have seven hours of reconstructive surgery to his face. Leaving his appearance distinctively altered in Episode V.
As much as I love the first segment it felt out of place since the other two dealt with the medical side of things. Body Bags isn’t the best Television movie, but it is a fun way of wasting an hour and a half. It seems like it’s too focused on the twists and turns that it actually forgets to be scary. Carpenter as the coroner is the best part about this film. He kind of reminded me of Beetlejuice. There’s plenty of macabre, tons of cameos, and overall a very entertaining watch.
3.4 OUT OF 5
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