Body Bags (1993) d. John Carpenter / Tobe Hooper (USA)
I’ll be honest, until its recent DVD/BR unearthing by Shout! Factory’s Scream Factory division, I had nearly forgotten this made-for-cable anthology effort even existed, much less sought it out. Since it’s billed as “John Carpenter presents Body Bags,” I was even unaware that Carpenter had served as director for the majority of the piece (two segments and the wraparound). Blame it on Wes Craven, whose stream of similarly branded straight-to-video awfulness (Dracula 2000, They, the 1998 Carnival of Souls remake) left me more than a little gun shy. And, in addition to the fact that it was made for Showtime long before its original programming was the stuff of ACE awards, no one within my horror crew ever talked about it. Like, at all. Even when the conversation would turn toward Carpenter and his output, people seemed to go out of their way to ignore this little gem, skipping straight from 1988’s They Live to 1994’s In the Mouth of Madness (with completists throwing in a cursory nod to Memoirs of an Invisible Man from 1992) without so much as a good, bad, or otherwise. Which is a darn shame, because this is horror charm on the cheap, a slice of low-budget cheese that should delight any fan of Tales from the Crypt or the short-lived syndicated series, Monsters.
