Freddy's 31 Days of Horror Day 13: John Carpenter presents Body Bags
My obligatory Carpenter flick this year is an extra special one! Back in the day with the rise of Horror Anthologies on television and cinemas Showtime partnered with John Carpenter for a straight to TV horror Anthology directed by big name directors and star studded casts with cameos by almost every big name in the horror business! Best of all? John Carpenter himself dressed up as the ghoulish host of these segments! He played a sarcastic puny Mortician who drinks formaldehyde like Gin and Tonic. He loves to hang around with his dead bodies but his favorite are the body bags, which all had to do with gruesome deaths and each had a story for him to tell! The first story of which is the Gas Station!
John Carpenter directs The Gas Station which is about a college student, Anne, on her first night working the night shift at a gas station. There are all kinds of crazies and weirdos that come frequent her gas station that night, but what really has her on edge is the fact that there is a serial killer on the loose! What really makes this segment fun are the cameos! Robert Carradine aka Luis Skolnick from Revenge of the Nerds is in it, David Naughton the werewolf from American Werewolf in London is in it and Wes Craven himself! They all play weird characters in this little tale that keeps you guessing which one of these weirdos is the serial killer Anne must face? We learn who it is when Anne goes to the bathroom and sees sadistic and torturous drawings in the bathroom stall and she faces off against the killer! Best Easter eggs though are in the booth! The employee of the month in the picture on the desk is Sam Raimi the director of Evil Dead! Then on the television we hear the name of the town they are in is called Haddonfield, the very same town John Carpenter's classic Halloween is set in! My hope is that it's all in the same universe but that's a fan boy's fantasy.
Our second story comes from what our host likes to call his Necrophile cabinets where he pulls out a baggy of mush to deliver us the second segment, Hair directed by John Carpenter. Hair features Stacy Keach who plays Richard, a man whose hair has started thinning and he is obsessively losing his mind over it. On television he sees an ad for a miracle hair grow remedy that requires no surgery, this procedure is invented by Dr. Lock played by David Werner from the Omen! He takes the remedy and the next day his hair grows as gloriously long as the mane of Meatloaf! But sadly it does not stop growing and hair begins encompassing his body and brain! What's worse is when he tried to cut it he heard screams and hissing noises as if the hair is alive! This segment might be my favorite as it's conclusion is so ironically dark and unexpected plus the scenes of what the hair actually is and looks like are awesome! This also features two really great cameos. We have a scene where Richard is looking out at all the people walking around him with better hair than him and one of them is none other than Greg Nicoterro of KNB FX, now show runner of Walking Dead, this was of course when he had his long luscious flowing eighties hair band hair. The second was my biggest surprise but they somehow managed to get Deborah Harry, Blondie to you non rocking folks, to play Dr. Locks sexually charged and bouncy nurse who helps Richard pick his hair style and later clean up Richard's mess of a situation!
Finally Mr. Carpenter informs us that we have time for one more story! With another drink of formaldehyde with an eye in it instead of an olive, we zoom into our next story! The Eye directed by Texas Chainsaw Director Tobe Hooper! Brent Mathews (Mark Hamill) is a Major League Baseball player who in a car accident loses his eye with a giant shard of glass! A doctor comes to him in his desperation and says he's been working on a new way to transplant eyes if he would like to be the first to try the operation. Consulting his wife Cathy (Twiggy!) he agrees and gets the transplant. Fortunately the surgery works but unfortunately Brent begins seeing horrific scenes of death and many tormenting images that begin to turn him into someone he's not! Brent then must discover whose eye is within his head causing all these bouts of anger! This is probably the most intense and horrific of the three segments. The imagery in all of Brent's visions ups the gore and blood quite a bit and most of the scenes are very disturbing. The transplant itself is very graphic and really eerie as scenes of the operation overlap with Cathy getting counseled by a priest and the prayer overlaps the surgery to a very foreboding effect! This segment also includes one of the most animalistic and horrifying sex scenes I've seen in a flick, it's not that a lot is shown but the way the actors convey their emotions in the scene while these visions of horror come over Brent that truly makes it terrifying. As the last segment ends we are treated to Tom Arnold and Tobe Hooper zipping up John Carpenter in his own body bag and being dragged away!
This is a fun little collection of horror segments that work mostly for the hardcore horror fans as they have so many Easter eggs within each segment. Unfortunately it never got picked up as a series but interestingly enough the producer Sandy King got together recently with Carpenter and produced a comic book with him called Asylum under Storm King productions, continuing some of the sensibilities of Body Bags. Keep looking through the body bags people and you'll find one that's not natural causes! 18 Days till Halloween Halloween! 18 Days till' Halloween! Silver Shamrock!
