underseen for Halloween: Body Bags (1993)

If we presently feel an inward relief, give thanks to the season, the sole one to grant a certain license: we relinquish the pretense of opposition to a "culture of death."  

Light and life arrange and justify themselves; it is our vain struggle against dying that needs framing by phrase and fable.

Though immersed in an ambitious essay, which I hope to publish while Sol still burns and gravediggers dig soft earth, I pause for my yearly charge, and post for the dreadful day.  

Body Bags is an intriguing title, if only from the mystique of movies made-for-TV, so often elusive after the initial window.  This was a bid for an anthology series for John Carpenter, who'd hammered his way to horror’s 2nd-tier, thanks to the (still underseen) TV slasher Someone’s Watching Me!, cult faves like The Fog, and the franchise-furthering Halloween and The Thing. As Carpenter acolytes, we appreciated his horror populism -- forgiving an excess of published interviews -- and the way he came back swinging after creative failures (Village of the Damned, any Halloween with a number appended).

the pride of Kentucky, John Carpenter

As written by the horror duo Billy Brown and Dan Angel (they'd go to series with Night Visions, and with R.L. Stine-based Goosebumps and The Haunting Hour) Body Bags is “worth a look,” successful in the modest goal of a fun, E.C. Comics gross-out. Still, every subgenre demands a certain amount of sweat: production values and pacing are good, but the stories have structural flaws that should’ve been addressed. 

Anne digs in

The opening is the most cinematic, set at night at a modern gas station (picture a sprawling version of that in the opening of 1953's Crime Wave). The point-of-view belongs to the improbably attractive young woman in the plexiglass shelter ringing up customers. Director Carpenter provides high style, as new-hire Anne (Alex Datcher) fences with late-night customers, from the disarming (David Naughton of An American Werewolf in London) to repulsive (Wes Craven in a cameo as a drunk creeper). 

Datcher is black, Naughton's white, and “The Gas Station” raises hackles with interracial flirting, but the later violence may be unrelated: the bad-guy seems to kill based on opportunity no motive needed (the twenty-years-past trauma is a cliche, but it works).  Still, the villain's real-life lineage touches the origins of horror cinema, and he meets a satisfying end: even at this full-service shop, he'll be beyond repair.

From here, Body Bags turns to body parts, first “Hair,” with Stacy Keach.  Richard seems to have it all -- nice apartment, young girlfriend -- but thinks only of his thinning hair.  His solution provides the excuse for memorably grotesque special effects.

The real problem is the girlfriend, hot-Scot Sheena Easton (initially a singer, Easton was not-bad as an actor but couldn't hide the burrrrr).  Like George Costanza, Richard needs a pre-emptive breakup.  Instead he consults an expert, as the script weakly spoofs "the Hair Club for Men,” then a stand-up comedy staple.  After a blissful interlude (think Jack Nicholson in Wolf or Wendell Pierce in "Something With Bite"), experimental plugs are revealed as mere (scalp) cover, leading to a CGI freakshow, a pocket Starship Troopers. 

The hairmonger is David Warner as “Dr. Locke,” nudge. The filmmakers even revive the Cronenbergian casting-for-name (ever notice? it's Samantha Eggar having The Brood, Stephen Lack as the prodigal weirdo in Scanners).  Locke’s assistant, naturally, is Debbie Harry (the Blondie singer).  Body Bags' ender "Eye" is a chronicle of baseball decline; the presence of Britain’s erstwhile supermodel “Twiggy” may be another elbow-to-the-ribs. 

The connecting theme here is the decline of white-American men (if that’s not too much gravity for a TV-movie with a male Medusa). Descent continues with the ballplayer, played by Mark Hamill (better known as Luke Skywalker), another bright-horizons space-hero scapegoated into spoof and satire: there’s William Shatner, of course, but also Adam West, from Robinson Crusoe on Mars and The Outer Limits "The Invisible Enemy" to Batman; Martin Landau, from Space:1999 to Ed Wood; and the Naked Gun franchise's Leslie Nielsen (Forbidden Planet), Tim O'Connor (Buck Rogers in the 25th Century), Fred Ward (The Right Stuff) and (speaking of horror) O.J. Simpson (Capricorn One). 

have your doctor take a look 

Note the fantastic genres are rarely kind to baseball, a past relic in The Twilight Zone ("Extra Innings") and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine; in The X-Files "The Unnatural," the midcentury game has been infiltrated by aliens.  Closer to Body Bags is the infamous E.C. story where human parts provide the diamond essentials (bases, etc.). 

This "Hands of Orlac" update gives Hamill's character the "Eye" of a dead serial killer, with flashbacks to the killer's abusive childhood.  Directed by Tobe Hooper, "Eye" may be the most "rounded" of the three stories, with a decent setup and payoff.  

The horror-anthology feature film became rare in the 1990s, perhaps because horror was more common on television.  In retrospect, the inception of horror series with continuing characters (Werewolf, Twin Peaks, Millennium) was a sign of our (ongoing) apocalypse.  Sustainable ratings remained elusive, so genre anthologies migrated to the thunderdome of cable-TV.  

A fantastic anthology is the most subversive TV format. In its hit-and-run episodes, anything can happen, to the destruction of the human race (a frequent indulgence of the 1990s Outer Limits).  It's a tempting crystal ball for creatives: George Romero produced Tales from the Darkside and Monsters; restoration would reveal the best as art-TV (my next post: rec's for Darkside).  Wes Craven served on the 1980s Twilight Zone, and stabbed at a semi-anthology with Nightmare Cafe; David Cronenberg directed an episode of another semi-anthology, Canada's millenarian Friday the 13th: The Series. 

Body Bags seems relatively unambitious, as if Carpenter's best hope for a series was to feint toward parodic crap, promising a Showtime equivalent to Tales from the Crypt.  Such a disguise may permit brilliant tragedy or social satire, and his proposed title may allude to the Nightmare on Elm Street/Twin Peaks motif "wrapped in plastic."  Like most attempts, though, Body Bags was discarded, to fill a single morgue-drawer of evidence.