A Look Back At ‘Body Bags (1993) On Its 25th Anniversary

This past August 8th was the 25^th anniversary of the 1993 made-for-television movie Body Bags. The film, produced by Showtime, is made up of three unrelated segments originally intended as episodes of a series that was never released, similar to Tales from the Crypt or The Twilight Zone. Directed by John Carpenter and Tobe Hooper, the film was released almost two decades after Hooper’s Texas Chain Saw Massacre and 15 years year after Carpenter’s Halloween (1992). Surprisingly, while Body Bags is accordingly fun, the film is far from truly inventive or masterful.

John Carpenter emcees in the playfully gruesome and schlocky tradition of undead horror hosts in a framing segment titled “The Morgue,” (where Hooper also makes an appearance) hamming it up and drinking formaldehyde out of a martini glass. Out of the film’s three narratives, “The Gas Station” is the strongest. In it, Anne (Alex Datcher) is working her first overnight at a booth at an isolated gas station, and she finds herself facing off with a killer. Creepiness builds in this short from the isolated vulnerability of the gas station, a point made visually by its pitch-black surroundings. The segment highlights the helplessness of a woman alone, and the precariousness of the identities of the people who filter in and out of the station. But the moves of the plot are predictable, as is the twist that the killer (Robert Carradine) has replaced the one person the woman trusts to watch out for her, the one whose identity, perhaps out of everyone, she thought she could be sure of.

A jazzy score nicely highlights the humor in the second segment, “Hair,” as it moves through its light and predictably humorous plot. A middle-aged man, Richard (Stacy Keach), upset over his thinning hair, and gets an entirely too brutal comeuppance for his vanity after buying into a television-advertised scheme for hair restoration. “Hair” netted some good-natured laughs from me, but they did not compensate for the drag that is the all-too-predictable final short, “Eye,” in which baseball player Brent (Mark Hamill) receives an experimental eye transplant from a corpse and begins to see flashes of memory from the donor, a murderer, and gradually loses control of himself. This segment is the least interesting and least creatively done of the three.

The segments of Body Bags balance each other tonally, with the comic interludes of “The Morgue” and “Hair” offering relief between the more serious horrors of “The Gas Station” and “Eye.” Roger Corman, Wes Craven, Sam Raimi, makeup effects artist Greg Nicotero, and Deborah Harry appear entertainingly in cameo roles. Overall, the film is light entertainment that fails to make much of an impact, a minor work from directors whose finer work is elsewhere.