Today’s pick comes courtesy of a YouTube video I watched the other day about Halloween anthology movies. I don’t have a tremendous amount of expertise in the subgenre but the ones I have seen, I will say that I am a big fan of in general. I don’t tend to stray too far from the big name ones like Creepshow or Tales from the Darkside. I will say that I’ve been giving the idea of adding a few to the collection a lot more thought since watching said internet vid. Trick ‘R Treat may be the only one currently in my possession. I know I should probably get up and go look at the shelves to check on a couple of titles but I’m pretty comfortable right now and this is just the opening to this review so it’s not super important.
So lets jump into the good stuff. The first thing I will say is that this movie is delightfully 90’s. It came out in 1993 as an attempt by Showtime to try and put together a serial similar to the HBO juggernaut “Tales From the Crypt”. In the end, the effort fizzled out and they simply converted the project into a movie and left it as that. The wrap around is set in a morgue with a gaunt John Carpenter as a sort of ghoulish narrator for the impending tales of nightmarish horror. There’s definitely a very similar vibe as the Crypt Keeper but with less puppetry and around the same amount of puns. We come to appreciate the title of the film as the best stories of death don’t come from manicured cadavers who died of natural causes. Those are a snoozefest for sure. The real stories filled with fright come in through long, black body bags where murder, suicide, or grisly accident manufacture a much more compelling narrative. These yarns are spun by kicking off 3 individual stories cultivated by a couple of well known horror icons. The first and second vignettes are helmed by the coroner himself, Carpenter, while the third is thanks to Tobe Hooper, the man behind the chainsaw down in Texas. Within the stories themselves are cameos from Wes Craven and Sam Raimi mixed in amongst the cavalcade of actors rounding out the cast. With this many big names involved in this project, there is a certain amount of viability that comes along with the project. Let’s hope that stacked cast and crew pays off.
The first body bag takes us to a lonely gas station where Anne will be working her first overnight. Taking over for Robert Carradine she settles in for an unfortunately memorable night where she may or may not make it out alive. Even though this movie is from 1993, I’m not going to spoil these stories. I will say that when this nerd decides to get his revenge, it’s not as exciting as you might hope. There’s one part where Anne is in duress and she did that typical slasher thing where she knocks her attacker out, then waits 36 seconds (I know because I counted) before slowly exiting the room she’s in to try and get to safety. She’s promptly attacked again and then runs across the parking lot to sit down and cry while looking away from the attacker again. I think this kind of nonsense is where we got all those horrible stereotypes of what people do in horror movies. There’s no way you loom over an attacker for 36 seconds. You get your behind OUTTTA there. That’s what you do. You don’t run over across the parking lot and sit down. That’s what ends up being wrong with these movies. That’s the stuff that takes me out of it. The problem is you have to cross that gap where I’ve been taken out of the realism of the story and into a position where I can enjoy the campiness of it all. If you don’t bridge that gap, the chasm between those two spots makes a lot of horror movies like this much less enjoyable. I’ll leave this first segment up to you to decide if it’s two machetes up or two machetes down in the end.
The second tale is a horror comedy segment. It starts Stacy Keach, Sheena Easton, Debbie Harry, and David Warner of TMNT 2: Secret of the Ooze fame. This one never lands for me. I can’t really dress it up. Stacy Keach is dating Sheena Easton. Right off the bat, nope. That’s not even close to believable. But he’s self conscious about his thinning hair. But not in the way a normal person would be. He’s obsessing over it. And it’s kind of to the point where I’d genuinely love to shave his head while he’s asleep just to make things so much worse for him. But that’s his role so he makes a huge deal out of it. Fortunately there’s a repetitive commercial where Dr. Lock keeps talking about their proven ability to regrow hair. After going to a salon where Kato Kaelin’s twin brother works, he reshapes Stacy’s hair and he puts on sunglasses so you know he’s both cool and means business. But he also buys a bunch of random products for his not hair and brings them home where he promptly messes up his salon hairdo, like you would clearly do. He puts some of that hair in a can on his head and it looks like he spray painted the top of his head. Sheena laughs at him and they part ways, seemingly in a fashion that could be permanent. In a state of absolute desperation, he seeks out Dr. Lock, where Debbie Harry from Blondie works as a nurse. They take a picture of him and put it into a computer where they can put different hairstyles on him. Following a short but fun montage of hair cuts, they select the lamest one they’ve dubbed “The Stallion” where he just has a ton of Fabio-esque long hair. Seems totally legit. They rub some creme on his head or something and he goes home bandaged. In the morning he takes the bandages off, still not entirely sure why that is necessary, but he finds the Stallion has sprouted from his sorry little head and he’s all good now. So Sheena comes over and she’s totally into it. That makes a ton of sense. She was only dating him for his hair. Which he was losing. But that didn’t matter. But now it does. And it all makes sense because it just does. They’re happy for like 3 days maybe. Then Stacy gets a sore throat and starts sleeping a lot. Eventually he has way too much hair and stops making out with Sheena. He goes back to the doctor thinking that’s a solution. Turns out the doctor is an alien and they’re breeding other aliens from his planet via the hair thing. Their hair like aliens like eating Stacy’s brain. So that’s a thing. The end. I’ll ruin this one because it’s not scary. And it’s only funny because it’s genuinely horrible. This wouldn’t even be up to snuff for a Tales from the Crypt knock off. Honestly, this wouldn’t even pass the smell test for an episode of Are You Afraid of the Dark. But that’s Carpenter’s second entry.
Finally we have “The Eye”. I’ll try and hit the high notes with this one as it attempts to be scary as well. Mark Hamill is a baseball player with a not at all creepy mustache. He’s a minor league player for the Bisons and he loves his wife a lot. Two things I suppose are important, kind of. He’s driving home after a really great game he played in because if there’s one thing you know about Mark Hamill is that he’s clearly a great baseball player, probably. But he’s driving in the rain and he really wants to listen to a particular cassette tape in his car. He can reach them in their big case but not very well. Also, he can’t pull the case closer to him because that would make sense. So he has to take off his seatbelt. He’s the only one driving on this road and he’s going pretty slowly. But he needs that tape. Also, remember, he took off his seatbelt. Guess what happens next? DEER IN THE ROAD! OH NO! Yeah, he crashed. And what I think is supposed to be glass goes into where his eye should be. And he sort of flicks it, which I don’t think he should do because it would probably hurt really bad and also it really lets you know how rubber the whole thing is. It turns out he really needed that eye for baseball. It’s going to be too tough to play now. So he’s probably going to have to give it up. And his wife, played by English model and actress “Twiggy”, is pregnant too! Oh no! How’s he going to see his kid also? Well he does have one good eye. But then here comes a doctor who wants to do an eye transplant. So they do the eye transplant. Do you think it goes well? Nope, it doesn’t. The eye starts showing him weird things. Spooky things. Then eventually you see Mark Hamill’s ass and the story is over. Other things happen, sure. But once you see his whole naked ass, it’s just over. Between the mustache and the ass, it’s donezo.
I really wanted to get to the end of this without being really sarcastic but I didn’t make it. As I went back through the stories I realized that so many 90’s horror movies were just painful to watch. The nice thing is that it really paved the way for the ones that were actually pretty good. The downside is I don’t think there were that many good ones so you had to sift through a lot of garbage. Body Bags probably shouldn’t have made it onto physical media. It probably shouldn’t have made it’s way onto Showtime or ever distributed any further than that. But it’s out there. The wrap around with John Carpenter at the beginning and the end is kind of fun. It’s a little repetitive and kind of one note but it’s just as entertaining as the Crypt Keeper ever was. So I’ll give him points for that. But in the day when you’ve got things like Creepshow, Twilight Zone: The Movie, and Tales from the Darkside out there, noise like Body Bags is just intolerable. The bar for something good or cheesy enough to be campy and bad is too easily hit by other more solid franchises. Body Bags is not worth the time. I had originally thought I’d give it a 4.5 but after reliving it through this, I’m downgrading to a 4. I’d still watch this again ahead of several other movies I’ve watched so far this season. This one is far from truly enjoyable but there’s enough collective moments to either mock or point at the screen and say “Hey! I know that guy from _______” that it’s more watchable than other tripe I’ve ingested so far. Hoping tomorrow’s pick will be a little fresher and a little better. Not sure what it will be yet. I’ll figure that out when the mood hits just right. So until that time, I’ll catch you on the flip side.
