Thoughts on Body Bags

I went to the Museum of the Moving Image last month to see as part of their John Carpenter weekend the 1993 anthology film Body Bags, which was made for Showtime as a pilot for a possible series in the style of Tales from the Crypt. It was pretty fun to watch. Carpenter directed the first two segments, and Tobe Hooper did the last one. It had a cast of stars and famous horror movie directors, with actors like Stacy Keach, Robert Carradine, Mark Hamill, Twiggy, Sheena Easton, David Naughton, Deborah Harry, David Warner, and directors like Sam Raimi, Tobe Hooper, Wes Craven, Roger Corman, and Carpenter himself as the horror host introducing the segments as “The Coroner.”

My favorite segment was the first one, where a young woman is working her new job on the night shift alone at a gas station, on the same night that a serial killer is on the loose, and a series of varying men are introduced, letting the audience try to figure out which one is the killer. I definitely got the killer wrong, and was surprised. The story has influence from Halloween, including Carpenter recreating one of his iconic shots of the killer rising from the ground behind the heroine, and there was a lot of really great suspense and creative camera angles. So this definitely felt more like a standalone movie and not so much a story segment.

The second segment was more horror comedy to me, where Stacy Keach is insecure about his thinning hair, and despite that his sexy girlfriend (Sheena Easton) isn’t bothered by it, he is obsessed with trying to fix it. He goes to a doctor he saw on TV, and ends up with a long mane of romance novel cover hair. But his hair keeps growing, his face breaks out in gnarly pustules, and his hair has tiny little snakes in it as hair follicles. This story I wasn’t as into, because it was a little too silly for me, but Keach was great at totally playing it seriously, and he has fantastically rich voice which, as Rifftrax said, can basically take any hokey line and give it actorly gravitas.

The last segment starred Mark Hamill as a baseball player who loses his right eye in a car accident, and his eye transplant gives him strange visions and personality changes. I could already figure out the end based on seeing similar stories, but it was a lot of fun seeing Hamill camp it up as a conflicted hero who can’t control his emotions and is just freaking out over his cursed eye.

This movie was a lot of fun to watch, and is available on YouTube.